Aoifinn Devitt: Maybe just to give the listeners the scale of the problem in the UK, 1 in 3 have less than 1 month’s living expenses in savings, so they can’t go more than 1 month if they lose their job. The average pension pot of a 40-year-old in the UK is £15,000. That’s not a year, that’s full stop £15,000. That is just way too low. That is definitely sort of inadequate.
Rob Gardner: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Rob Gardner, who’s the CEO and co-founder of Rebalance Earth, which redirects the flow of capital to protect and restore nature at scale. He was a guest on this podcast in 2021, and that show is linked in the show notes. He’s recently written a book with the title Freedom, which advocates 3 money moves to transform your finances: earn it, keep it, grow it. This is just one part of his career-long mission to further financial literacy, education, and investing for a world worth living in. Welcome back, Rob. Thanks for joining us here.
Aoifinn Devitt: Great to be back, and it’s— I can’t believe it’s been 3 years.
Rob Gardner: 3 and a half actually at my count. So yes, that’s been smart. Well, so let’s start with a quick update. Clearly 3 and a half years since we last chatted online anyway in this forum. Can you quickly update us on your career moves when you arrived at Rebalance Earth and something about the vision of that organization?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, so 3 and a half years ago, I was the Director of Investments at St. James’s Place. So responsible probably for about 100, at that time, probably about 120 £125 billion worth of assets on behalf of probably three-quarters of a million individuals, and really about a) getting the right financial, long-term financial performance to deliver their— what they needed, and also embedding responsible investing. And I was really passionate about this idea of how you can make your money as a force for good. So I kind of live by these three mantras: money is a force for good, financial markets is a force for good, and business is a force for good. And just to kind of recap, Reddington, the first business I founded, and Mallory Street, the second business I founded, are both B Corps. And our intention is that Rebalancer should become a B Corp as well. So kind of really trying to demonstrate that, that business can be a force for good. I suppose it was whilst I was at St. James’s Place, we were doing a lot to not just embed ESG, but we were the first wealth manager to sign up to GFANS. And at COP26 launched at the time what was the largest sort of Paris-aligned global equity fund. It was about £14 billion and we’d not only committed to take our portfolio to net zero by 2050, but also to achieve those goals by 2025. And we wanted to do it without divesting. We wanted to do it through engagement, and we wanted to do it thoughtfully across listed equities, across bonds, across emerging markets, and across property. This is the segue because it was at COP26 that everyone suddenly started talking about biodiversity, and this stat just hit me in in the, the face, which is Since 1970, we’ve lost nearly 70% of our wildlife. And it just, I’d seen that stat before from the WWF, it’s called the Living Planet Index, but it was just a real wake-up call. At the same time, that’s when I came across sort of Isabella Tree and her book all about rewilding. And there was the beginnings of a movement around natural capital and how do we put a price on the value of nature. And so from 2021 onwards, I started making personal investments in startups like Rebalance Earth, BZero, Tierra Foods, all foods, all small company startups trying to solve this climate nature nexus. And just, you know, just for context, I’m in my mid-40s, I’m married, I have two girls. And for those listeners in that situation, you probably know that you start to think about your children rather than yourselves. And I kind of started saying, well, like, where do I want to be in 10 years’ time? I had an amazing job and I still had amazing opportunities where I was. The sad truth is, once you really understand what’s happening with climate change and, you know, without sounding too bearish, just how bad it is, I thought, you know what, I’m really lucky. I’ve been working for 25 years. I studied geography. I understand glaciology and hydrology. I’ve worked in investment banking, I’ve worked as a pension consultant, I’ve been an asset owner. I, I have an opportunity to connect finance and nature, which is really the missing piece. So I decided to quit SJP in 2022, a bit like when I quit Merrill Lynch to start Redington. Everyone was like, wow, are are you, you crazy? You had a really good job. Why are you leaving? And sort of fast forward 20 months You know, Rebalance Earth has just taken seed funding from the largest in-house local government pension scheme in the UK, and we’re about to launch as a fund manager, really positioning nature as infrastructure to solve the problems of climate adaptation as, as well as mitigation and restoring nature. And through all of this, obviously we had COVID, and it was during COVID when everyone was making banana bread that I decided to write a book called Freedom: Earn It, Keep It, Grow It. I think last time you had me on, we talked about my first book, Save Your Acorns. And really, I wanted to write a book aimed at young professionals aged 18 to 35, earning money, probably not really thinking about their pension, maybe at some stage thinking, do they want to save for a deposit to buy a house? And just thinking about ISAs and investing. And I cover a whole host of topics. And so it’s really important to remember that that book was written for a younger audience. And actually, just a few weeks ago, I got a book review from a 16-year-old, which made me really happy. His mum had bought it for him, and he wrote a blog that got posted, and he really enjoyed it, which is great because I didn’t write it for 16-year-olds. And yeah, he really— he read it cover to cover, and he wrote a great blog article about, like, how much he took out of it, which is just awesome.
Rob Gardner: Well, I do think that some of those financial literacy themes are ones that we can always be reminded of. We can forget, and I think it’s important to relearn time to time, and we’re going to dive into them. But first, to recap on Rebalance Earth, I think you are one of the few in the industry that really embody your values and has been able to tie together the nexus of, as you said, the financial industry and the good it can do with real meaningful change in in the, the nature sphere as well as elsewhere. So very excited to see what comes of that. And we’ll have to get you back for round 3 when Rebalance Earth is the star. But today it’s financial literacy that’s the star. So yes, it may be organized as designed for a younger audience, but it’s not that basic either. I think there are some pretty core tenets of this book, which is designed as a toolkit. So can you talk a little bit about what a toolkit generally is to fix something? So is there something broken that you think needs to be fixed when it comes to attitudes to money?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah. So look, if let’s say this was a conference, I normally start by asking 3 questions. So the first questions I’d ask of the audience is, who here received high quality financial education growing up? And if I was in a room of 100 people, I’d be amazed if I got 5 people put their hand up. The second question I ask is, who here wish they’d received financial education growing up? And maybe two-thirds of the hands go up. And then I asked the third question. I said, I want you to be honest here. Who here, either as a teenager or as an adult, has made a financial mistake that they regret? And I promise you, every hand in the room goes up and everyone starts laughing because every single one of us has made a financial mistake that we regret. Now, you know, most people listening to this podcast probably have good jobs, have good financial resilience, and therefore are able to overcome those bumps. But sadly for many people, those mistakes can become costly. And if you make too many in a row, it can send you on a horrible pathway. And just maybe just to give the listeners the scale of the problem in the UK, 1 in 7 adults have no savings at all. 1 in 3 have less than 1 month’s living expenses in savings, so they can’t go more than 1 month. If they lose their job. The average pension pot of a 40-year-old in the UK is £15,000. That’s not a year, that’s full stop £15,000. That is just way too low. That is definitely sort of inadequate. And currently the state pension is about 5% of GDP. So imagine you’re Rachel Reeves. By the way, that’s projected to grow to over 8% by 2070. So that’s going to have a huge impact that we’re just going to have to tax just to keep that going. And then the crazy thing is, is if you look at mental health, over half of all mental health issues are to do with some kind of money issue, typically indebtedness. It’s a major cause of breakup in marriages and relationships, and this just isn’t sustainable. And I suppose that’s, that’s the scale of the problem. And As you know, since 2012 I’ve been passionate about teaching children about money through Redstart, and that’s why I write Save Your Acorns. And this is just another part of the toolkit in an age-appropriate way, using stories. So it’s not like a tell-you book. I use anecdotes and stories about famous people, about, about people that you probably know, people that I’ve worked with. I’ve changed their names where I share their real-life stories and anecdotes to bring to life, as you say, the kind of key tenets that I think to create financial freedom, which are kind of earn it, keep it, and grow it. And then I kind of break down each of them under those, under those 3 categories.
Rob Gardner: And it’s fascinating because I think if I were in that conference and you were asking me, did I receive a financial education? No formal financial education, but I think it’s true that we’re all receiving an education. Educations don’t have to be good. Educations come from what we’re seeing and what we soak up around us. And the, you talk about wiring. And I think our wiring is set by the environment we grow up in. Some of us are wired to save, some not. Some of us are wired not to spend or not to enjoy spending. And some of that can come from the upbringing that we’ve had. So I suppose when you’re thinking about a toolkit, obviously there will always be individual attitudes to money that will always be different. And therein is the diversity that I suppose makes an economy interesting. And different spending patterns. How do you adapt this toolkit to recognize that there’s always going to be a variation?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, so I very much try not to be tell. I was trying to give guidelines and rules of thumbs and frameworks. So absolutely. I mean, you know, my parents are probably at the end. I just keep telling them to spend their money, you know, but they can’t. They were hardwired because of the way they were born to save everything. They just can’t spend any money. I think what I’m trying to do is just point out the other way. What’s the opportunity cost of not saving and growing your money? And just for context, my mom and dad were both teachers and they taught all over the world. They, you know, I was born in Holland, we lived in Argentina, and a lot of my insight into money came from growing up as a 7 to 10 year old in Argentina when inflation was running at like 30% a month, 1,000%. A year, currency devaluation. And, you know, my parents, very hardworking, very good at saving money, but they had no idea about how to invest their money. So when interest rates started to fall, they had no way to grow their money. And I was very lucky. I started my career at Deutsche Bank, then Merrill Lynch, and then in pensions. And then this sort of crazy idea that you could buy shares and own a little bit of Apple and Microsoft and Google.. And over time, if you could hold on to it and not panic, you could make money. And so hence I thought my parents taught me how to earn it and keep it, but they didn’t know how to grow it. And I just wanted to share, I think I had a successful, good career in investment banking and as an investment consultant. But in 2008-9, I panicked and I sold all of my investments. And I remember saying to myself, I will never make this mistake. Again. And so there’s a chapter called sort of In It to Win It, which is this idea that you’ve got to be invested. But I acknowledge just how hard it is to stay invested, and I tell the story of Ulysses and the sirens because it’s easy to look back and see the S&P 500 go up in what looks like a straight line over the last 10 years, but it’s a bumpy ride. So a lot of the things in the book are kind of easy to say or easy to write or easy to read, but they’re kind hard to do. So it is definitely behavioral. And I’m just, as I say, just sharing guidance on how much money should you have set aside for cash to cover bills, to give you peace of mind, how much you might want to save, how much you might want in retirement. But they’re definitely guides. And crucially, because I was writing for a younger audience, I’ve got 2 chapters on crypto, which many people— some people think that that’s almost sinful that I have 1 chapter on crypto. But I I think you’ve gotta know your audience and you’ve gotta kind of go to where they are. And sort of 2 years on from having written it, I’m really pleased that I think I get the tone right, that I’m not, it’s rubbish, but neither am I, you know, it’s great and it’s gonna save the world. So I really wanted to write a book that was kind of evergreen. And so given it’s coming up to 2 years since I kind of finished writing the copy, I’m quite pleased that it has stood that sort of test of time.
Rob Gardner: Yeah, not addressing crypto instead of unicorns, but tied to the mast would be like the ostrich head in the sand, it would not really be reflecting, I think, the generational priorities. There’s a few kind of, maybe they’re tropes, maybe they’re true, that I’d like to just cycle through to see whether there’s any truth in them and maybe how we tackle it. One is around perceived shifting of priorities of the younger generation in favor of experiences perhaps, and owning less. So whether it’s maybe the property market has become prohibitively expensive and they cannot get on that market, or just kind of the rental mentality and owning less and experiencing more. How do you, would you tackle that? Because that might kind of hit up against some of the, of the growing part.
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah. So one of the things I did, I wrote the first draft of the book in about 6 months. So June 2020 to December 2020, and then it took me almost 2 years to publish it. I had quite a lot of people working for me at SJP. I had 18-year-olds, I had 21-year-olds, I had 25-year-olds. And so I gave a copy of my book to probably 10 different people under the age of 30 to read it. And I practiced this concept called radical candor, and they all read it and gave me some really good candor. I mean, the basic stuff like, you know, Rob, people don’t use credit cards now, it’s buy now, pay later. People don’t use eBay, they use these other sites. Don’t pigeonhole, don’t pigeonhole us as the kind of avocado and toast generation. We hate that. We hate the way that people position us as that. So I suppose I, you know, I didn’t obviously test 10,000 young people, but I went to a representative audience of the people I was writing it for and got that feedback. And pretty much the feedback from all of them is that we didn’t know any of the stuff you were telling us, Rob, and we wish we’d known, and here’s a better way of telling us these, these things. And that’s my point, actually. I Quite often people talk about this of 3 savings jars, and I use this analogy of a battery. When you have your phone, your smartphone, it’s fully charged in the morning, hopefully, if you plugged it in overnight. And then as you use it, it goes down and then it goes into low power mode. And I kind of analogize your sort of financial freedom. You fully charged, you’re financially free, or you depleting it. And then I talk about your kind of today fund your tomorrow fund and your day after tomorrow. Your day after tomorrow is retirement, but your tomorrow fund is to do whatever you want. It might be go on holiday, it might be to get married. So I’m not prescriptive about is it experiences, are you going to buy a guitar, or are you going to buy a road bike, or whatever you want to do. But I’m just trying to say you’ve got your today fund and you’ve got to manage it, and you’ve got to read your payslip. I mean, I’ve got an entire chapter on reading your payslip because people don’t even understand their sort of payslip. And then I’m saying, well, then you might want to divvy up and think about what are you saving for your tomorrow fund and what are you saving for your day after tomorrow? And by the way, your workplace probably takes care of it, but you probably need to engage with it and understand what’s going on. And let me show you some, some simple maths where actually saving an extra £50 a month because of sort of tax relief, and maybe your company does matching, can be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds when you’re retiring., and you may or may not want to do that, but no, understand the opportunity cost is how I’ve kind of framed everything throughout the book.
Rob Gardner: And then on the this is wiring, again, going to, it’s a related question, but you talked about people being wired to save or not wired to save. And of course, you’re saving your acorns was even an attempt to, to sort of lay that down, the concept very early for, for younger readers. Are saving levels dropping here in the, in the developed world? And is this getting worse?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, I mean, they are in, in, in the developing world. I think part of that is that, you know, we’ve had COVID, we’ve had inflation, you know, so people have been forced to eat into their savings. At the same time, you’ve got to remember that globally we spend billions of dollars. I mean, some of our most valuable companies in the world basically make money from monetizing our eyeballs to get us to spend stuff that we don’t need and make us want stuff. So look, some of the lower savings ratio— I I would, would say there’s probably 3 reasons. The first one, more localized, the last few years, has definitely been sort of COVID cost of living, and all the rest. People are just forced into it. The second is that just the level of consumerism and advertising has never been greater, which is just sort of compels us to want to buy stuff that we don’t need. And the number of people who buy stuff and regret it is, is huge. And then the, the sort of third, the third thing is that people don’t know what to do. So they’re like, yeah, but I don’t know where to save. I don’t know, do I buy a stock? Do I invest in a fund? I don’t understand what the S&P 500 is. I don’t know these brands. Can I trust these companies? So all three of these things are kind of blockers to, to saving and investing. I’ll I’ll show you a lovely anecdote of an example of— so my personal trainer read my book and he said, so Rob, what I do is every time I go on Amazon to buy something, I buy it and I put it in my basket, and then I immediately put that amount in my Nutmeg account, and then I go to bed, and then I wake up and decide if I want to buy it or not. And 8 times out of 10, I end up not buying the thing I was about to buy on Amazon. So I think that’s just a great example. Obviously, I don’t tell him to do that in that book, but that’s what he took out of out of reading the book is a sort of behavioral hack to address a habit he had and turn it into a positive habit.
Rob Gardner: The other trend we’re seeing is a rise in these buy now, pay later schemes, and just which are really just forms of leverage. How do you see them as a danger, I suppose, to young people with rising levels of leverage?
Aoifinn Devitt: I think it’s a huge problem because obviously what credit and buy now pay later is just that on steroids, is it allows you to buy something big that you can’t afford. So for my parents and certainly for me growing up, if I wanted something big, I’d have to save for it and I’d have to save for a very long time to get something. So the idea that I can own a car or buy a new iPhone every year or all the rest on these kind of credit and buy now pay later is horrifying. And I think what is horrifying is that many young people, or many people who use these sort of buy now pay later apps, don’t, don’t really understand it’s credit or debt. They literally just think it’s like free money. And one of the characters in the book who I know really well, she came to work for me years ago at Readington, and when she was in her early 20s, not with buy now pay later but with store card, Specifically, she would just go up, sign up to all these store cards. Typically you get a 10-20% upfront, buy a load of stuff. By the time she started working for me in her early 30s, she was drowning in credit card debt, compounding at 25 or 30%. So the money she owed was like 3 times the money she’d spent in the first place. And of course, all the clothes and things that she’d bought, you know, she no longer used, were probably already already gone and buy now, pay later is just even worse. So it it is, is a it is a big, big problem. But obviously that’s one of the reasons it’s been so successful because it gives people what they want right now.
Rob Gardner: And then when it comes to the actual crisis that we’ve witnessed, because there’s that, we’ve we’ve clearly, already spoken about COVID being a crisis and some of the financial market crisis. Has there been anything learned from that? Is there, I know we all speak now by the fact that most of this younger generation hasn’t actually lived through that. But has there been any way of instilling discipline through some of those experiences?
Aoifinn Devitt: Look, I think like everything in life, there are people, you know, there’s an entire generation of, I think they’re called the FIRE generation, but it’s, I’m trying to remember what it, but these are the people who want to save hyper aggressively before they’re 40 and get to a million dollars and then sort of retire. It’s, I think it, I can’t remember what the F is, but it’s something retire early. You’ve got any extreme, and then you’ve got on top of that, you’ve got all the crypto bros who allegedly made millions of dollars during the sort of crypto run. I think the lessons learned, because obviously this is a personal finance book, are personal. And so what I wanted to do was have enough variety in there that some section of the book would speak to that person where they’re at. Maybe they’ve recently got divorced and they’ve realized that they didn’t know anything about money and their partner knew everything about money. And they’re like, oh, I need to know about money. Or maybe they’re a young person who’s been pumping around on crypto because their friends do, but it’s never felt right. And actually, something really simple like setting up an ISA and just putting in £200 a month in a broadly diversified stock market makes, makes a a lot, lot a lot more, more sense. So unfortunately, by the time it gets down to the retail investors, the number of outcomes is so varied, it’s huge. All I’m trying to do is say have you thought about this? Here’s a toolkit, here’s stuff that you could do differently to take control of your finances. I think what I tap into into the book is the sense that most people are out of control, don’t feel either out of control or don’t feel comfortable in the first place, and therefore are just not doing anything. They’re basically earning their money and spending it, or maybe putting it in the bank. And obviously when I wrote this, interest rates were— it’s before interest rates started hiking and that sort of inflation really really, really took off. So it is meant to be— again, you know, to be clear, I’m aiming this at people who are probably earning £30,000 to £80,000 a year. I’m not writing it— you know, it’s not written for people who are on very low incomes, and it’s not written for people on £250,000 or more. It’s very much that you have a good job, you might be a lawyer, you might be an accountant, you might be working for a big global brand earning good money but not silly money, and what should you do?
Rob Gardner: And then you also do more in the financial literacy space besides writing books for, for two very distinct age cohorts. You also are— you have a Redstart. Can you talk about your involvement in Redstart and KCL?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, so back in 2012 when I was kind of running Reddington, we were really keen to give back, and we started this charity called Red Star. And to begin with, it delivered sort of financial education to secondary school kids. It was very much delivered as a kind of talk-at-type lecture. At that same time, so 2012, auto-enrolment came out, and the problem was that suddenly, all of a sudden, people were in a defined contribution pension, which was nothing like a defined benefit pension. And you might have two employees sat next to each other, both thinking they had a pension, but very different outcomes. And 2013, some research came out from Cambridge University that said that our money-saving habits are formed by the age of 7. And so there was a gap in the market because at the time a lot of the banks gave financial education to kind of GCSE teenagers. And so we pivoted in 2013 to focus on primary school And at the same time, we pivoted and turned it into a game. So this kind of concept called gamified learning, learning through doing. So there’s no sort of talk at— everything is delivered through this game called sort of Money Matters. And we teach concepts like earning money, like growing money, keeping money. We scam the kids. And it’s very powerful. And so we were doing that and then COVID hit and obviously we couldn’t go into the classroom and And so during COVID we created some collateral you could download. I used to read Save Your Acorns and run a session after school like 4 times a month for different age groups. But then as we came out of COVID the CEO of Red Star, a lady called Sarah Marks, she came up with a strategy because her challenge— and it was a good one— is like, look, we’ve delivered financial education to 45,000 children, but there were 4.7 million primary school kids in the UK. And can we look at ourselves in the mirror and say, have we honestly made a difference? So she came up with what’s called the Change the Game strategy, which is in order to get 4.7 million primary school kids understanding money, we need to get high-quality financial education on the primary school syllabus. And by that point, I’d been lobbying and engaging in government a lot of time, and not everyone believes that financial education works, should be on the primary school syllabus, and if you did put it on the primary school syllabus, what would you take out of it? And there’s very little longitudinal research. So we were like, okay, instead of reaching more and more schools, let’s focus. Let’s pick 6 locations: London, Cardiff, Bristol, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Lowestoft. So some urban, some coastal, and some countryside, all social deprivation 5 and below. So these children come from very poor families, but huge ethnic mix. Some of these schools are almost like 99% white, some of them are 99% ethnic minority depending on where they are in the UK. And what if we did a study that tracked from reception right the way through to year 6? So this is like a 7-year longitudinal study rolling of 18,000 kids. And this can’t be done by us. This needs to be done by high-quality academic research. And so we found a partner with King’s College Policy Institute to carry out this longitudinal study. And so these kids are getting age-appropriate financial education all the way through their school years. We’ve created like a, a bank app where the kids can earn Redstart pounds because these kids don’t have any money. So they’ve got like a little app where they can take math questions and earn money. There’s a shop where they can apply and work in the shop, and there’s a small shop that sells rubbers and rulers and small things, and there’s a big shop where at the end of the year you can buy Lego and, and big items. We’re tracking all of that data, and we’re now sort of into our second year and, and answering two key questions. Can we teach young children about money, i.e., the attitudes, the behaviors, and the knowledge? And two, is there a scalable model that allows us to go from 18,000 pupils to 4.7 million? And the goal is that by 2030, hopefully, if the research carries the way we’re steering and, and everything else, we’ll be able to go to whoever’s in government in 2030 and say, yes, it works, here’s a delivery model to do it.
Rob Gardner: I love it. The scale phenomenon is just exactly finance at its best. I think it’s taking what works and taking it from there. So let’s end on the topic of education. And now I’m going to turn it on you. 3 and a half years ago we spoke, we clearly had it, we’ve emerged from the pandemic, you’ve moved on, you’ve, we talked about Rebalance Earth. Any life lessons that you’ve added to over this time or anything new that you now are living by?
Aoifinn Devitt: I think the big one for me as I get older is my health and just really prioritizing sleep, exercise, and diet. And it becomes harder. I like my food, I drink, but at the same time, I understand that to be a good dad, to be good at my— to be hopefully a good business person, I need to be fit and healthy and vital. And so, so I think that’s as a pillar of what I do. Health is— I listen to more and more health podcasts. I’m much more thoughtful about what I eat. I’m much more thoughtful about how much exercise I’m, I’m doing. So that has definitely been something that’s been a big shift. I put on a lot of weight in, in lockdown, and, you know, it’s taken me a few years to sort of shift it. I think the second one is just reconfirming mantras or kind of concepts that I, that I already knew, which is there’s stuff that you can control and there’s stuff that you can’t control. So focus on the things you can control. So what I eat and how much I exercise and how much I sleep are things that I can control, right? So that’s a good example. And then I think the second thing is that big changes don’t happen. They’re just a series of small steps. REDDStart will be a big change hopefully in 2030, but it will have been a journey from 2012 to 2030 with some really bigger steps. Readington is 18 years old now. You know, Rebalance Earth is sort of coming up to 2 years old. I think it’s just a reminder that you’ve just got to keep taking those steps. And a bit like money and a bit like in the book, these things kind of compound. So You know, one of my mantras in the book is decades, not days. And I apply that to everything. I apply that to my relationship with my wife and with my good friends. I’m trying to apply that to sort of health. And of course, it applies to investing. So yeah, they would— there’d be some classics that I’ve doubled down on and some new ones.
Rob Gardner: Well, fair play for actually identifying those values, because many of us don’t even take the time to go that far. So Rob, it’s been a great pleasure to talk about this. I think an only an interim of what I think will be a series of podcasts we’ll do together because this has been, I think, critical to remind ourselves of some of the most fundamental lessons of financial literacy and reiterate them and remind ourselves to bring them to our children and beyond and to scale what we do know. So thank you so much for sharing this with us. I’m delighted to keep watching the next next phase of this adventure?
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you for having me back. And yeah, I look forward to being back, hopefully in 2027, if not sooner.
Rob Gardner: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors on their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
Aoifinn Devitt: Maybe just to give the listeners the scale of the problem in the UK, 1 in 3 have less than 1 month’s living expenses in savings, so they can’t go more than 1 month if they lose their job. The average pension pot of a 40-year-old in the UK is £15,000. That’s not a year, that’s full stop £15,000. That is just way too low. That is definitely sort of inadequate.
Rob Gardner: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Rob Gardner, who’s the CEO and co-founder of Rebalance Earth, which redirects the flow of capital to protect and restore nature at scale. He was a guest on this podcast in 2021, and that show is linked in the show notes. He’s recently written a book with the title Freedom, which advocates 3 money moves to transform your finances: earn it, keep it, grow it. This is just one part of his career-long mission to further financial literacy, education, and investing for a world worth living in. Welcome back, Rob. Thanks for joining us here.
Aoifinn Devitt: Great to be back, and it’s— I can’t believe it’s been 3 years.
Rob Gardner: 3 and a half actually at my count. So yes, that’s been smart. Well, so let’s start with a quick update. Clearly 3 and a half years since we last chatted online anyway in this forum. Can you quickly update us on your career moves when you arrived at Rebalance Earth and something about the vision of that organization?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, so 3 and a half years ago, I was the Director of Investments at St. James’s Place. So responsible probably for about 100, at that time, probably about 120 £125 billion worth of assets on behalf of probably three-quarters of a million individuals, and really about a) getting the right financial, long-term financial performance to deliver their— what they needed, and also embedding responsible investing. And I was really passionate about this idea of how you can make your money as a force for good. So I kind of live by these three mantras: money is a force for good, financial markets is a force for good, and business is a force for good. And just to kind of recap, Reddington, the first business I founded, and Mallory Street, the second business I founded, are both B Corps. And our intention is that Rebalancer should become a B Corp as well. So kind of really trying to demonstrate that, that business can be a force for good. I suppose it was whilst I was at St. James’s Place, we were doing a lot to not just embed ESG, but we were the first wealth manager to sign up to GFANS. And at COP26 launched at the time what was the largest sort of Paris-aligned global equity fund. It was about £14 billion and we’d not only committed to take our portfolio to net zero by 2050, but also to achieve those goals by 2025. And we wanted to do it without divesting. We wanted to do it through engagement, and we wanted to do it thoughtfully across listed equities, across bonds, across emerging markets, and across property. This is the segue because it was at COP26 that everyone suddenly started talking about biodiversity, and this stat just hit me in in the, the face, which is Since 1970, we’ve lost nearly 70% of our wildlife. And it just, I’d seen that stat before from the WWF, it’s called the Living Planet Index, but it was just a real wake-up call. At the same time, that’s when I came across sort of Isabella Tree and her book all about rewilding. And there was the beginnings of a movement around natural capital and how do we put a price on the value of nature. And so from 2021 onwards, I started making personal investments in startups like Rebalance Earth, BZero, Tierra Foods, all foods, all small company startups trying to solve this climate nature nexus. And just, you know, just for context, I’m in my mid-40s, I’m married, I have two girls. And for those listeners in that situation, you probably know that you start to think about your children rather than yourselves. And I kind of started saying, well, like, where do I want to be in 10 years’ time? I had an amazing job and I still had amazing opportunities where I was. The sad truth is, once you really understand what’s happening with climate change and, you know, without sounding too bearish, just how bad it is, I thought, you know what, I’m really lucky. I’ve been working for 25 years. I studied geography. I understand glaciology and hydrology. I’ve worked in investment banking, I’ve worked as a pension consultant, I’ve been an asset owner. I, I have an opportunity to connect finance and nature, which is really the missing piece. So I decided to quit SJP in 2022, a bit like when I quit Merrill Lynch to start Redington. Everyone was like, wow, are are you, you crazy? You had a really good job. Why are you leaving? And sort of fast forward 20 months You know, Rebalance Earth has just taken seed funding from the largest in-house local government pension scheme in the UK, and we’re about to launch as a fund manager, really positioning nature as infrastructure to solve the problems of climate adaptation as, as well as mitigation and restoring nature. And through all of this, obviously we had COVID, and it was during COVID when everyone was making banana bread that I decided to write a book called Freedom: Earn It, Keep It, Grow It. I think last time you had me on, we talked about my first book, Save Your Acorns. And really, I wanted to write a book aimed at young professionals aged 18 to 35, earning money, probably not really thinking about their pension, maybe at some stage thinking, do they want to save for a deposit to buy a house? And just thinking about ISAs and investing. And I cover a whole host of topics. And so it’s really important to remember that that book was written for a younger audience. And actually, just a few weeks ago, I got a book review from a 16-year-old, which made me really happy. His mum had bought it for him, and he wrote a blog that got posted, and he really enjoyed it, which is great because I didn’t write it for 16-year-olds. And yeah, he really— he read it cover to cover, and he wrote a great blog article about, like, how much he took out of it, which is just awesome.
Rob Gardner: Well, I do think that some of those financial literacy themes are ones that we can always be reminded of. We can forget, and I think it’s important to relearn time to time, and we’re going to dive into them. But first, to recap on Rebalance Earth, I think you are one of the few in the industry that really embody your values and has been able to tie together the nexus of, as you said, the financial industry and the good it can do with real meaningful change in in the, the nature sphere as well as elsewhere. So very excited to see what comes of that. And we’ll have to get you back for round 3 when Rebalance Earth is the star. But today it’s financial literacy that’s the star. So yes, it may be organized as designed for a younger audience, but it’s not that basic either. I think there are some pretty core tenets of this book, which is designed as a toolkit. So can you talk a little bit about what a toolkit generally is to fix something? So is there something broken that you think needs to be fixed when it comes to attitudes to money?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah. So look, if let’s say this was a conference, I normally start by asking 3 questions. So the first questions I’d ask of the audience is, who here received high quality financial education growing up? And if I was in a room of 100 people, I’d be amazed if I got 5 people put their hand up. The second question I ask is, who here wish they’d received financial education growing up? And maybe two-thirds of the hands go up. And then I asked the third question. I said, I want you to be honest here. Who here, either as a teenager or as an adult, has made a financial mistake that they regret? And I promise you, every hand in the room goes up and everyone starts laughing because every single one of us has made a financial mistake that we regret. Now, you know, most people listening to this podcast probably have good jobs, have good financial resilience, and therefore are able to overcome those bumps. But sadly for many people, those mistakes can become costly. And if you make too many in a row, it can send you on a horrible pathway. And just maybe just to give the listeners the scale of the problem in the UK, 1 in 7 adults have no savings at all. 1 in 3 have less than 1 month’s living expenses in savings, so they can’t go more than 1 month. If they lose their job. The average pension pot of a 40-year-old in the UK is £15,000. That’s not a year, that’s full stop £15,000. That is just way too low. That is definitely sort of inadequate. And currently the state pension is about 5% of GDP. So imagine you’re Rachel Reeves. By the way, that’s projected to grow to over 8% by 2070. So that’s going to have a huge impact that we’re just going to have to tax just to keep that going. And then the crazy thing is, is if you look at mental health, over half of all mental health issues are to do with some kind of money issue, typically indebtedness. It’s a major cause of breakup in marriages and relationships, and this just isn’t sustainable. And I suppose that’s, that’s the scale of the problem. And As you know, since 2012 I’ve been passionate about teaching children about money through Redstart, and that’s why I write Save Your Acorns. And this is just another part of the toolkit in an age-appropriate way, using stories. So it’s not like a tell-you book. I use anecdotes and stories about famous people, about, about people that you probably know, people that I’ve worked with. I’ve changed their names where I share their real-life stories and anecdotes to bring to life, as you say, the kind of key tenets that I think to create financial freedom, which are kind of earn it, keep it, and grow it. And then I kind of break down each of them under those, under those 3 categories.
Rob Gardner: And it’s fascinating because I think if I were in that conference and you were asking me, did I receive a financial education? No formal financial education, but I think it’s true that we’re all receiving an education. Educations don’t have to be good. Educations come from what we’re seeing and what we soak up around us. And the, you talk about wiring. And I think our wiring is set by the environment we grow up in. Some of us are wired to save, some not. Some of us are wired not to spend or not to enjoy spending. And some of that can come from the upbringing that we’ve had. So I suppose when you’re thinking about a toolkit, obviously there will always be individual attitudes to money that will always be different. And therein is the diversity that I suppose makes an economy interesting. And different spending patterns. How do you adapt this toolkit to recognize that there’s always going to be a variation?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, so I very much try not to be tell. I was trying to give guidelines and rules of thumbs and frameworks. So absolutely. I mean, you know, my parents are probably at the end. I just keep telling them to spend their money, you know, but they can’t. They were hardwired because of the way they were born to save everything. They just can’t spend any money. I think what I’m trying to do is just point out the other way. What’s the opportunity cost of not saving and growing your money? And just for context, my mom and dad were both teachers and they taught all over the world. They, you know, I was born in Holland, we lived in Argentina, and a lot of my insight into money came from growing up as a 7 to 10 year old in Argentina when inflation was running at like 30% a month, 1,000%. A year, currency devaluation. And, you know, my parents, very hardworking, very good at saving money, but they had no idea about how to invest their money. So when interest rates started to fall, they had no way to grow their money. And I was very lucky. I started my career at Deutsche Bank, then Merrill Lynch, and then in pensions. And then this sort of crazy idea that you could buy shares and own a little bit of Apple and Microsoft and Google.. And over time, if you could hold on to it and not panic, you could make money. And so hence I thought my parents taught me how to earn it and keep it, but they didn’t know how to grow it. And I just wanted to share, I think I had a successful, good career in investment banking and as an investment consultant. But in 2008-9, I panicked and I sold all of my investments. And I remember saying to myself, I will never make this mistake. Again. And so there’s a chapter called sort of In It to Win It, which is this idea that you’ve got to be invested. But I acknowledge just how hard it is to stay invested, and I tell the story of Ulysses and the sirens because it’s easy to look back and see the S&P 500 go up in what looks like a straight line over the last 10 years, but it’s a bumpy ride. So a lot of the things in the book are kind of easy to say or easy to write or easy to read, but they’re kind hard to do. So it is definitely behavioral. And I’m just, as I say, just sharing guidance on how much money should you have set aside for cash to cover bills, to give you peace of mind, how much you might want to save, how much you might want in retirement. But they’re definitely guides. And crucially, because I was writing for a younger audience, I’ve got 2 chapters on crypto, which many people— some people think that that’s almost sinful that I have 1 chapter on crypto. But I I think you’ve gotta know your audience and you’ve gotta kind of go to where they are. And sort of 2 years on from having written it, I’m really pleased that I think I get the tone right, that I’m not, it’s rubbish, but neither am I, you know, it’s great and it’s gonna save the world. So I really wanted to write a book that was kind of evergreen. And so given it’s coming up to 2 years since I kind of finished writing the copy, I’m quite pleased that it has stood that sort of test of time.
Rob Gardner: Yeah, not addressing crypto instead of unicorns, but tied to the mast would be like the ostrich head in the sand, it would not really be reflecting, I think, the generational priorities. There’s a few kind of, maybe they’re tropes, maybe they’re true, that I’d like to just cycle through to see whether there’s any truth in them and maybe how we tackle it. One is around perceived shifting of priorities of the younger generation in favor of experiences perhaps, and owning less. So whether it’s maybe the property market has become prohibitively expensive and they cannot get on that market, or just kind of the rental mentality and owning less and experiencing more. How do you, would you tackle that? Because that might kind of hit up against some of the, of the growing part.
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah. So one of the things I did, I wrote the first draft of the book in about 6 months. So June 2020 to December 2020, and then it took me almost 2 years to publish it. I had quite a lot of people working for me at SJP. I had 18-year-olds, I had 21-year-olds, I had 25-year-olds. And so I gave a copy of my book to probably 10 different people under the age of 30 to read it. And I practiced this concept called radical candor, and they all read it and gave me some really good candor. I mean, the basic stuff like, you know, Rob, people don’t use credit cards now, it’s buy now, pay later. People don’t use eBay, they use these other sites. Don’t pigeonhole, don’t pigeonhole us as the kind of avocado and toast generation. We hate that. We hate the way that people position us as that. So I suppose I, you know, I didn’t obviously test 10,000 young people, but I went to a representative audience of the people I was writing it for and got that feedback. And pretty much the feedback from all of them is that we didn’t know any of the stuff you were telling us, Rob, and we wish we’d known, and here’s a better way of telling us these, these things. And that’s my point, actually. I Quite often people talk about this of 3 savings jars, and I use this analogy of a battery. When you have your phone, your smartphone, it’s fully charged in the morning, hopefully, if you plugged it in overnight. And then as you use it, it goes down and then it goes into low power mode. And I kind of analogize your sort of financial freedom. You fully charged, you’re financially free, or you depleting it. And then I talk about your kind of today fund your tomorrow fund and your day after tomorrow. Your day after tomorrow is retirement, but your tomorrow fund is to do whatever you want. It might be go on holiday, it might be to get married. So I’m not prescriptive about is it experiences, are you going to buy a guitar, or are you going to buy a road bike, or whatever you want to do. But I’m just trying to say you’ve got your today fund and you’ve got to manage it, and you’ve got to read your payslip. I mean, I’ve got an entire chapter on reading your payslip because people don’t even understand their sort of payslip. And then I’m saying, well, then you might want to divvy up and think about what are you saving for your tomorrow fund and what are you saving for your day after tomorrow? And by the way, your workplace probably takes care of it, but you probably need to engage with it and understand what’s going on. And let me show you some, some simple maths where actually saving an extra £50 a month because of sort of tax relief, and maybe your company does matching, can be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds when you’re retiring., and you may or may not want to do that, but no, understand the opportunity cost is how I’ve kind of framed everything throughout the book.
Rob Gardner: And then on the this is wiring, again, going to, it’s a related question, but you talked about people being wired to save or not wired to save. And of course, you’re saving your acorns was even an attempt to, to sort of lay that down, the concept very early for, for younger readers. Are saving levels dropping here in the, in the developed world? And is this getting worse?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, I mean, they are in, in, in the developing world. I think part of that is that, you know, we’ve had COVID, we’ve had inflation, you know, so people have been forced to eat into their savings. At the same time, you’ve got to remember that globally we spend billions of dollars. I mean, some of our most valuable companies in the world basically make money from monetizing our eyeballs to get us to spend stuff that we don’t need and make us want stuff. So look, some of the lower savings ratio— I I would, would say there’s probably 3 reasons. The first one, more localized, the last few years, has definitely been sort of COVID cost of living, and all the rest. People are just forced into it. The second is that just the level of consumerism and advertising has never been greater, which is just sort of compels us to want to buy stuff that we don’t need. And the number of people who buy stuff and regret it is, is huge. And then the, the sort of third, the third thing is that people don’t know what to do. So they’re like, yeah, but I don’t know where to save. I don’t know, do I buy a stock? Do I invest in a fund? I don’t understand what the S&P 500 is. I don’t know these brands. Can I trust these companies? So all three of these things are kind of blockers to, to saving and investing. I’ll I’ll show you a lovely anecdote of an example of— so my personal trainer read my book and he said, so Rob, what I do is every time I go on Amazon to buy something, I buy it and I put it in my basket, and then I immediately put that amount in my Nutmeg account, and then I go to bed, and then I wake up and decide if I want to buy it or not. And 8 times out of 10, I end up not buying the thing I was about to buy on Amazon. So I think that’s just a great example. Obviously, I don’t tell him to do that in that book, but that’s what he took out of out of reading the book is a sort of behavioral hack to address a habit he had and turn it into a positive habit.
Rob Gardner: The other trend we’re seeing is a rise in these buy now, pay later schemes, and just which are really just forms of leverage. How do you see them as a danger, I suppose, to young people with rising levels of leverage?
Aoifinn Devitt: I think it’s a huge problem because obviously what credit and buy now pay later is just that on steroids, is it allows you to buy something big that you can’t afford. So for my parents and certainly for me growing up, if I wanted something big, I’d have to save for it and I’d have to save for a very long time to get something. So the idea that I can own a car or buy a new iPhone every year or all the rest on these kind of credit and buy now pay later is horrifying. And I think what is horrifying is that many young people, or many people who use these sort of buy now pay later apps, don’t, don’t really understand it’s credit or debt. They literally just think it’s like free money. And one of the characters in the book who I know really well, she came to work for me years ago at Readington, and when she was in her early 20s, not with buy now pay later but with store card, Specifically, she would just go up, sign up to all these store cards. Typically you get a 10-20% upfront, buy a load of stuff. By the time she started working for me in her early 30s, she was drowning in credit card debt, compounding at 25 or 30%. So the money she owed was like 3 times the money she’d spent in the first place. And of course, all the clothes and things that she’d bought, you know, she no longer used, were probably already already gone and buy now, pay later is just even worse. So it it is, is a it is a big, big problem. But obviously that’s one of the reasons it’s been so successful because it gives people what they want right now.
Rob Gardner: And then when it comes to the actual crisis that we’ve witnessed, because there’s that, we’ve we’ve clearly, already spoken about COVID being a crisis and some of the financial market crisis. Has there been anything learned from that? Is there, I know we all speak now by the fact that most of this younger generation hasn’t actually lived through that. But has there been any way of instilling discipline through some of those experiences?
Aoifinn Devitt: Look, I think like everything in life, there are people, you know, there’s an entire generation of, I think they’re called the FIRE generation, but it’s, I’m trying to remember what it, but these are the people who want to save hyper aggressively before they’re 40 and get to a million dollars and then sort of retire. It’s, I think it, I can’t remember what the F is, but it’s something retire early. You’ve got any extreme, and then you’ve got on top of that, you’ve got all the crypto bros who allegedly made millions of dollars during the sort of crypto run. I think the lessons learned, because obviously this is a personal finance book, are personal. And so what I wanted to do was have enough variety in there that some section of the book would speak to that person where they’re at. Maybe they’ve recently got divorced and they’ve realized that they didn’t know anything about money and their partner knew everything about money. And they’re like, oh, I need to know about money. Or maybe they’re a young person who’s been pumping around on crypto because their friends do, but it’s never felt right. And actually, something really simple like setting up an ISA and just putting in £200 a month in a broadly diversified stock market makes, makes a a lot, lot a lot more, more sense. So unfortunately, by the time it gets down to the retail investors, the number of outcomes is so varied, it’s huge. All I’m trying to do is say have you thought about this? Here’s a toolkit, here’s stuff that you could do differently to take control of your finances. I think what I tap into into the book is the sense that most people are out of control, don’t feel either out of control or don’t feel comfortable in the first place, and therefore are just not doing anything. They’re basically earning their money and spending it, or maybe putting it in the bank. And obviously when I wrote this, interest rates were— it’s before interest rates started hiking and that sort of inflation really really, really took off. So it is meant to be— again, you know, to be clear, I’m aiming this at people who are probably earning £30,000 to £80,000 a year. I’m not writing it— you know, it’s not written for people who are on very low incomes, and it’s not written for people on £250,000 or more. It’s very much that you have a good job, you might be a lawyer, you might be an accountant, you might be working for a big global brand earning good money but not silly money, and what should you do?
Rob Gardner: And then you also do more in the financial literacy space besides writing books for, for two very distinct age cohorts. You also are— you have a Redstart. Can you talk about your involvement in Redstart and KCL?
Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, so back in 2012 when I was kind of running Reddington, we were really keen to give back, and we started this charity called Red Star. And to begin with, it delivered sort of financial education to secondary school kids. It was very much delivered as a kind of talk-at-type lecture. At that same time, so 2012, auto-enrolment came out, and the problem was that suddenly, all of a sudden, people were in a defined contribution pension, which was nothing like a defined benefit pension. And you might have two employees sat next to each other, both thinking they had a pension, but very different outcomes. And 2013, some research came out from Cambridge University that said that our money-saving habits are formed by the age of 7. And so there was a gap in the market because at the time a lot of the banks gave financial education to kind of GCSE teenagers. And so we pivoted in 2013 to focus on primary school And at the same time, we pivoted and turned it into a game. So this kind of concept called gamified learning, learning through doing. So there’s no sort of talk at— everything is delivered through this game called sort of Money Matters. And we teach concepts like earning money, like growing money, keeping money. We scam the kids. And it’s very powerful. And so we were doing that and then COVID hit and obviously we couldn’t go into the classroom and And so during COVID we created some collateral you could download. I used to read Save Your Acorns and run a session after school like 4 times a month for different age groups. But then as we came out of COVID the CEO of Red Star, a lady called Sarah Marks, she came up with a strategy because her challenge— and it was a good one— is like, look, we’ve delivered financial education to 45,000 children, but there were 4.7 million primary school kids in the UK. And can we look at ourselves in the mirror and say, have we honestly made a difference? So she came up with what’s called the Change the Game strategy, which is in order to get 4.7 million primary school kids understanding money, we need to get high-quality financial education on the primary school syllabus. And by that point, I’d been lobbying and engaging in government a lot of time, and not everyone believes that financial education works, should be on the primary school syllabus, and if you did put it on the primary school syllabus, what would you take out of it? And there’s very little longitudinal research. So we were like, okay, instead of reaching more and more schools, let’s focus. Let’s pick 6 locations: London, Cardiff, Bristol, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Lowestoft. So some urban, some coastal, and some countryside, all social deprivation 5 and below. So these children come from very poor families, but huge ethnic mix. Some of these schools are almost like 99% white, some of them are 99% ethnic minority depending on where they are in the UK. And what if we did a study that tracked from reception right the way through to year 6? So this is like a 7-year longitudinal study rolling of 18,000 kids. And this can’t be done by us. This needs to be done by high-quality academic research. And so we found a partner with King’s College Policy Institute to carry out this longitudinal study. And so these kids are getting age-appropriate financial education all the way through their school years. We’ve created like a, a bank app where the kids can earn Redstart pounds because these kids don’t have any money. So they’ve got like a little app where they can take math questions and earn money. There’s a shop where they can apply and work in the shop, and there’s a small shop that sells rubbers and rulers and small things, and there’s a big shop where at the end of the year you can buy Lego and, and big items. We’re tracking all of that data, and we’re now sort of into our second year and, and answering two key questions. Can we teach young children about money, i.e., the attitudes, the behaviors, and the knowledge? And two, is there a scalable model that allows us to go from 18,000 pupils to 4.7 million? And the goal is that by 2030, hopefully, if the research carries the way we’re steering and, and everything else, we’ll be able to go to whoever’s in government in 2030 and say, yes, it works, here’s a delivery model to do it.
Rob Gardner: I love it. The scale phenomenon is just exactly finance at its best. I think it’s taking what works and taking it from there. So let’s end on the topic of education. And now I’m going to turn it on you. 3 and a half years ago we spoke, we clearly had it, we’ve emerged from the pandemic, you’ve moved on, you’ve, we talked about Rebalance Earth. Any life lessons that you’ve added to over this time or anything new that you now are living by?
Aoifinn Devitt: I think the big one for me as I get older is my health and just really prioritizing sleep, exercise, and diet. And it becomes harder. I like my food, I drink, but at the same time, I understand that to be a good dad, to be good at my— to be hopefully a good business person, I need to be fit and healthy and vital. And so, so I think that’s as a pillar of what I do. Health is— I listen to more and more health podcasts. I’m much more thoughtful about what I eat. I’m much more thoughtful about how much exercise I’m, I’m doing. So that has definitely been something that’s been a big shift. I put on a lot of weight in, in lockdown, and, you know, it’s taken me a few years to sort of shift it. I think the second one is just reconfirming mantras or kind of concepts that I, that I already knew, which is there’s stuff that you can control and there’s stuff that you can’t control. So focus on the things you can control. So what I eat and how much I exercise and how much I sleep are things that I can control, right? So that’s a good example. And then I think the second thing is that big changes don’t happen. They’re just a series of small steps. REDDStart will be a big change hopefully in 2030, but it will have been a journey from 2012 to 2030 with some really bigger steps. Readington is 18 years old now. You know, Rebalance Earth is sort of coming up to 2 years old. I think it’s just a reminder that you’ve just got to keep taking those steps. And a bit like money and a bit like in the book, these things kind of compound. So You know, one of my mantras in the book is decades, not days. And I apply that to everything. I apply that to my relationship with my wife and with my good friends. I’m trying to apply that to sort of health. And of course, it applies to investing. So yeah, they would— there’d be some classics that I’ve doubled down on and some new ones.
Rob Gardner: Well, fair play for actually identifying those values, because many of us don’t even take the time to go that far. So Rob, it’s been a great pleasure to talk about this. I think an only an interim of what I think will be a series of podcasts we’ll do together because this has been, I think, critical to remind ourselves of some of the most fundamental lessons of financial literacy and reiterate them and remind ourselves to bring them to our children and beyond and to scale what we do know. So thank you so much for sharing this with us. I’m delighted to keep watching the next next phase of this adventure?
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you for having me back. And yeah, I look forward to being back, hopefully in 2027, if not sooner.
Rob Gardner: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors on their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
