#100 Celebration Episode! Personal Finance Special with Joshua. Don't pay off your mortgage! What does it feel like when your investments earn more than you do? How do you cope when your income gets cut in half? What are some of the most under discussed

Yeah, I've got a line of episodes in mind.

It's not sustainable.

And, you know, the phenomenon of two people working as a necessity to run life, basically.

That's not really sustainable.

So, yeah, interesting to find out if that kind of...

What kind of effect has that had on your relationship, your marriage?

Well, I think...

Practically, there was a time where we thought that, well, first of all, moving to Wales was a bit of a gamble because Serena had her job in London and we thought, well, she did a bit of remote working.

Let's move to South Wales and see, you know, maybe she can do more remote working or more of it.

And that turned out not to work.

LAUGHTER So that door was firmly closed, but actually in a very helpful way.

I think Irina would say this herself, but she said, that's not something I would want to be doing at the moment.

And I could see that she was finding it really hard juggling or dividing the brain between the work brain... modern brain and I mean I can resonate with that but I find that really hard as well and yeah that's that was difficult but on the contrary then thinking back to like advice that people receive in their in their twenties and you often hear people say well that's the time to discover yourself you know go out and have a gap year or discover the world and find what you want to do And on reflection, I did the opposite and I got my head down.

I could have worked harder, but I worked reasonably and I had a very clear financial plan and I lived substantially below my means and I just went save, save, save, save.

The investing came a little bit later, but I'm only now starting to realise how much of a big life-changing decision that was, because a decade later now, I'm going, oh, wow, that's given me a lot of freedom.

And I think Irina and I both go, if I had made those decisions, life would be

very different now.

Yeah, life would be really tough.

Yeah, because I think you can underestimate...

even after everything that I've just said, how much peace of mind that can give you.

Because you've got the option.

Yeah.

And I know things are different.

It's a different time now to when, I mean, you're a little bit younger than me, but when I started working, started dating, it was almost by accident, really.

up living again considerably below our means and we, because I didn't know any better, tried to pay off our mortgage as quickly as we could.