How to work through your money blocks

Tamsin speaks to the Female Money Doctor, Nikki Ramskill, about being in a financially controlling relationship and how to get out of it. They also chat about her work with women around changing their money mindset.

Dr Nikki, also known as The Female Money Doctor has over 12 years of experience as an NHS GP and women’s health specialist. She has experienced first-hand the impact poor money management skills have on the mental and physical health of her patients and colleagues, and is on a mission to change that.

She believes that we cannot be truly healthy while a money nightmare is going on in the background; health and wealth is intimately intertwined.

She has trained as a money coach, and runs an award winning blog, The Female Money Doctor.Com. She is the ONLY doctor to be featured in the top 25 feedspot list of Personal Finance Blogs in the UK, and has been highlighted in Plum’s Top 5 Personal Finance Blogs for female financial independence.

She has been featured in a variety of media outlets, including London Live Radio with Jo Good, Anthea Turner’s Hot Topics, Grazia magazine and The Daily Mail.

She now helps women from all over the world to improve their mental health and well-being through getting organised with their finances and building wealth for the future they truly deserve.

W: https://thefemalemoneydoctor.com

***Find out your money personality using my FREE QUIZ >> https://thefemalemoneydoctor.com/sma-quiz/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/femalemoneydoctor/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/femalemoneydoc/?hl=en

Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/thefemalemoneydoctor

Tamsin is a Chartered Financial Planner with over 20 years experience. She works with couples and individuals who are at the end of a relationship and want agree how to divide their assets FAIRLY without a fight.

You can contact Tamsin at tamsin@smartdivorce.co.uk or arrange a free initial meeting using https://calendly.com/tamsin-caine/15min. She is also part of the team running Facebook group Separation, Divorce and Dissolution UK

Tamsin Caine MSc., FPFS
Chartered Financial Planner
Smart Divorce Ltd
https://smartdivorce.co.uk

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Transcript

(The transcript has been created by an AI, apologies for any mistakes)

Tamsin Caine 0:06
Hello and welcome to the Smart Divorce Podcast. I'm Tamsin Caine and I will be your host. In series three, we will be speaking to a number of experts and professionals in the divorce arena, and answering the questions that we get asked most often. If you've got a question and you don't think we've answered it yet, please do get in touch, you can email me at Tamsin@smartdivorce.co.uk. Now over to our guests. Hello, and welcome to the Smart Divorce Podcast. I'm joined today by Dr. Nikki Ramskill and yes, you heard that right, Dr. Nikki is a practising NHS doctor. And she's also a qualified money coach. And we've talked today about being in a controlling financial relationship, and how Nikki negotiated that and managed to uncouple herself from it. We also talk about sacred money archetypes and the different types that are out there, and how you can find out what yours is. So let's jump right in. Nikki, how are you doing?

Nikki Ramskill 1:23
Oh, good. Thank you. So thank you so much for having me really appreciate being able to chat to you finally, it's great.

Tamsin Caine 1:32
Okay, we're really excited about having this conversation because I know that this is going to be really helpful to lots and lots of our listeners. And so one of the things that we're going to talk about today is about controlling money relationships. So this is something that you've had whilst you weren't married at the time, it is an experience that you've been through. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about that?

Nikki Ramskill 2:03
Yeah, it's really funny, because I'm now married to a different man. And at the time, I was engaged to somebody else, and I was, what 21-22 At the time, which is really young. Now I think about it to be engaged. I'm thinking wow, that's, that's really young anyway. So it felt like I was in a marriage though. It was that serious. We've been together like, seven years or something, by the time we finished actually split up in the end. And so I feel like I've got that experience of having gone through a divorce. It's not quite the same, but um, you know, we weren't married. So obviously, we don't have a legal stuff to go through and all the money that comes with that, but But definitely, from a from the kind of guilt, the shame, the the emotions, that was definitely similar. Yeah, absolutely. So in this relationship, I had allowed him to manage all of our finances. So he did everything. He offered to show me what was going on, but I really wasn't interested, it was more of a, you're doing it, you get on with it, you know, and he, he would say things like, well, I can do this better anyway, you can manage them, you can manage the house, you can do those bits and all sorts of money out. So it was almost like that was how that was all division of labour. Even though I think I got the wrong end of the stick on that one. You know, the, it's so what ended up happening was all of my money from being a student, and then getting my first paycheck, everything went into our joint account, we had no separate accounts, or at least, I didn't have my own account he may have done, because I don't know what actually happened with our money. I've got no idea what he was how he was managing it. So I had to ask for an allowance if you like or worse or money to be able to spend on what I wanted to spend it on. And I think it it got to a point where I really wanted to go on a holiday with my friends. I've never been on the holiday with the girls before it was it was not an experience that ever had. And they all wanted to go to Paris and I was really keen to go with them. So I said, I just need 300 pounds to go to Paris that will get on your board and lodgings and a bit of spending money and to get me there. And he said, No, we don't have the money in our budget to do that you can't go. And that I think was the point where I realised how deep I was in to this relationship and he might not see it as being controlling. And I've forgiven him, but certainly to a 21-22 year old that wants to live her life and do what she wants to do to be told no, it's like being in a parent child relationship. It's not like being in an equal partnership. So I used my credit card to do that and I was already starting to rack up debt by this point. So this was just another thing to add on to the debt pile. A month later he paid for one of those you know those remembers those Hoover's those big round discs that automate house and hoover it, yeah 300 pounds, that thing cost, guess whose money he used our joint money to do that he didn't ask me permission, he just did it, you paid for it. So that's that was the unequal dynamic that was in the relationship. And I'd allow that to happen. Because now reflecting back, I can see that I was had that mirrored for me. So when I was a child growing up, my mum was in control of our finances, my dad had to ask for an allowance to be able to do what he wanted to do. So I had that mirrored for me, so that for me, that's what it was normal, you know, it was it was normal that one parent had the money. The other parent was the one that was told how they could spend it. And, yeah, I took that through into my relationship. But it was the other way around. It was me losing the control and, and quite freely giving up that control. And I will never ever do that again. Because when I finished that relationship, I lost everything I had no, my name wasn't on our mortgage, because at the time we took the mortgage out, it was at the point with the financial crisis was just about to hit in 2008. I think it was around that time, wasn't it. And I was still a student. So I couldn't go on the mortgage didn't really have an income, I just had a student loan that I was living off of. So everything was in his name, despite the fact that my student loan money and my wages were going into this property to help pay for it. And he refused to give me any money for it. He just said no, it's now in a negative equity, because by that point, the crash had happened. And we then owed more than the house the flat was worth. So he said, no, you've put me in a position where I can't afford to pay for our monthly repayments. Therefore you owe me money. And because I felt incredibly guilty about having finished this relationship a year before we were meant to get married, so we'd already started planning our marriage at this point. I was so I felt so guilty about it. I just paid him. And now when I think about it makes me cringe. And I think oh my god, why did you do that? I even gave up my engagement ring. You know, all these all of these things I did out of emotion of guilt and shame and just wanting to to do what do right by him because I thought I was the bad guy and all of this. And yeah, I made some stupid mistakes towards the end of that relationship. But it was more a symptom of the fact I felt so hemmed in and controlled not because I'm a bad person. And I can see that now. Whereas at the time it I felt very much like I was in the wrong for everything. So yeah, so thankfully out of that one, and I'm never going to go there again.

Tamsin Caine 7:42
How do go about kind of uncoupling that

Nikki Ramskill 7:50
it was very much it was very much like I had to like cut it off, it was almost like I'd severed that part of my life with a knife. And it made him feel really unhappy with that. Because he until that point, had no idea how unhappy I was because I wasn't I didn't feel competent enough to be able to say to anybody how I was feeling because I thought I was I was weird or odd for wanting to get out of this relationship. So it was very cold. It seems like that to him, because there was no other way I could have done it. So it was very much a packed bag. I had literally my books, my clothes, my shoes, and that was it. And I just left that entire life behind me. I had four babies and everything, I had to leave them all behind me. So because we had no joint mortgage, we had we had a joint account, but that was very rapidly closed. We had nothing else joint. Okay, we I think we had a will. But that very, you know, I changed my will so that he wasn't Beechjet anymore. And that was it. So it was really easy. I had no children, we had no nothing else was joined. So uncoupling from a financial perspective was actually pretty straightforward. It was the emotional mess that was left behind that took a while to get over.

Sure. Yeah. How? How long did it take you to understand that you had been being controlled financially or you'd at least you'd felt like you were being controlled financially?

I would say it probably took a course of a year from first noticing that he was saying no to a lot of my requests. And it was only until I started asking my friends and my work colleagues about how they manage money with their partner. But I realised I was in a really weird situation. And that that is a real shame because if we all talk about money more, actually more people perhaps wouldn't be in the same situation because we've realised the kind of place we're in. It took one of my friends to say look, Nikki, but you sound like a desperate housewife. Yeah, and you're like you're climbing the walls. And from that I suddenly realised that my life was going in a trajectory that I didn't want and I wasn't comfortable with. And I think that was when I made the decision, I had to do something about it. And it felt like perhaps we could have gone to therapy and talked about it. If I'd spoken to a patient, I'd say, Have you thought about therapy? But I think it was beyond it. At that point. I just, I just had to in my mind, it had ended, and I just had to leave. And that was it.

Tamsin Caine 10:30
Yeah, no, absolutely. Do you think that if you had had more financial education at school, for example, that you would have not got yourself into that position? Or is there anything that you can think of that that could have been done with because you weren't really young, like 21 is really young to be in that in that situation? Is there anything that you can think if if that had happened, then I perhaps wouldn't have been in that in that situation?

Nikki Ramskill 11:04
Yeah, possibly, I think if I'd done a bit more school around money, perhaps it would have done but that's the thing that I say to people is, yes, it's all very well, and good schools getting involved in helping with that they're already very overburdened, they've already got loads of stuff they need to teach us. But if I'm being modelled by my parents about the normal way of managing money, I'm not sure I would have necessarily followed anything that I would have been told about. So it came down to me talking to people about how they did it, to suddenly realise that mine was a bit of a strange situation to be in. It's not strange, because there are lots of people in the same thing, women that look after kids, and their partner is the one that goes out and earns the money. But they generally don't dictate to their partner how they can spend that money for their children on themselves on the house. The partner that is not working, has full autonomy over that. And they've got very open and honest relationship about it. I had none of that. So that that was what the odd thing about it was not about one person earning more than the other. It's about how that interaction happened. So So yeah, maybe if I'd learnt a bit more at school about it, perhaps. But for me, the norm was that one person had all the finances and the other person had to ask for the money.

Tamsin Caine 12:19
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So if I'm just thinking about how, if if somebody got into a relationship, and was perhaps in the early days of it as a new relationship, and that they're listening to this going to sell sounding a little familiar. What do you think there is some there is anything that you could, as a couple have done to rectify it? Like before it got to the point of needing therapy? Or do you think it was, that was his nature,

Nikki Ramskill 12:57
Possibly a bit of his nature, and because I'm also very laid back and chilled out as an individual, it that was the dynamics that kind of came out. But I think if I'd shown more of an interest in finances, at that point, perhaps I would have been, would have felt so control because I would have understood what was going on with the money. You know why I couldn't do X, Y, and Z or whatever. But if I'd had more of a safe, so in it, perhaps it would have been a bit different. But I think the relationship was probably doomed to fail. Anyway, from quite earliest, early stage, we we stayed together a long time, I don't quite know how that happened. But it was more I guess, out of habit in the end, rather than actually wanting to be with that person. But when you start to see them more as a friend rather than as a partner, and it is kind of gone anyway. And I also changed a lot in that timeframe. From being a team, right, the way up to when I actually eventually left the relationship, I became a completely different person. So it was never gonna work out.

Tamsin Caine 13:58
No, no, fair enough. I do think that we hear so often about, about couples who don't talk about money, there is one person who looks after the finances. And that's perfectly fine whilst you're in a team because you play to each you play to the strengths of that team, don't use like I'm dreadful at gardening. So I never did the gardening in my marriage. And now I'm not married, I have gotten cuz that's how bad I am at it. But I think when it comes to money, even if you're not the person who looks after the money, you still need to, you need to know about it, you need to understand about it and you need to know where it is you need to know what you're spending and like, I think we talked about having a rainy day, you know, just sounds dull, but just kind of sitting down as a couple and once a month or something and just Okay, this is where we're at this is where I'm really is this is what we're spending it on. This is how it looks. This is where the car insurances, this is where the mortgage, you know, this is kind of a natural situation. So, yeah, both doing the same job, but you at least understand where the net is that the kind of thing that you would advocate. Now you're in a kind of different position. Absolutely.

Nikki Ramskill 15:27
Yeah. I mean, it's a great thing to be able to sit with your partner and say, right, okay, this is what's going on for our finances right now. But it can only happen if you if you can feel like that with your partner. And to be honest, if you can't, then you have to question the relationship. And I, the first time I revealed to my, my now husband that I was in a huge amount of debt, I panicked over it, because I knew the reaction I would have got from the other one. And I'd extrapolated that theory, on to my new relationship, and hadn't kind of realised that I was in a completely different space, completely different man, completely different set of responses. And he was like, Okay, that's a lot of money, but fine, and weed. And I'd said to him, right from the start, I'm responsible for this, I'm not expecting you to bail me out of this at all, I am going to do my best to get out of it. But I cannot help you with a mortgage right now, in terms of getting a mortgage application, you're going to have to do that yourself. So luckily, he was able to do that, because he was in a much better position than me, and it was fine. We're now at a point where we're going to apply for a new mortgage, and it'll be in a joint name. And you know, because everything's all cleared up now. And it's great. But I had to, I had to voice that. Otherwise, he would have found out when the mortgage advisor turned around and said, he's in this much debt, right? And coming from a mortgage advisor, and that would have been a lot worse. So So yeah, money dates. You know, ours are really casual. We sit on the sofa, we might have a glass of wine. It's not even a date. It's like, this has come out of our account this month. What's that? Oh, yeah, that's for this thing. All right, cool. Well, we got in our savings account, we got this. Okay. That's it. That's the extent of our conversation. But obviously, when we have to sit down for bigger conversation, the mortgage and stuff at that will, we do, and it's fine, because we can be open with each other about it. There's one one thing that I actually have started getting people to do in my community. They called Money habitude cards. And I've got my husband to do these the other day, he was really into it, it was he was surprised, because he's not in the mood to anything that I do. So these are, these are the money habitude cards. I think about $20 to buy online or something like that. So I'm happy to share the link with using going have a look. But essentially, what it does is it it gets you to read statements on the back of the cards, and you have to decide is it like you or is it not like you or sometimes like you. So you each do it separately. So you sit down and you put them into piles, and you sort them out. And then you count up the number of different categories you're in, okay, and your partner then does exactly the same. And you compare your results. So you might have a planner with a spontaneous person or a security with a carefree. And then you can start to understand why you might clash over something. And that can be enough to sort of just open up the conversation a little bit just to start to get a word in edgewise about what what you want to do with your money. So that's quite a nice thing to do on a money date as well sit down and play a game like that.

Tamsin Caine 18:40
I like the idea of cards as trying to understand. So one of the things that that we talked about, that I wanted to discuss with you today was about money archetypes because this is one of your things, isn't it? So So tell me, tell me more.

Nikki Ramskill 19:02
So I suppose it's it's similar to the money habitude cards and that you're categorising yourself. But the money the sacred money archetypes is something that I've learned from a woman called Kendall Summer Hawk, and I've become a coach in that area from her teaching. And it comes from the idea there are eight different money personality types, and we've got all eight within us. But three of them have got the biggest impact on how we are with money and can change slightly over time. But essentially, those three are your core. And then you might borrow some of the energy from some of the archetypes as and when you need to use it. And it's fascinating because once you understand what personality you have, you can then start to understand why you might be doing what you're doing. So I'm a maverick money archetype and Mavericks tend to jump from thing to thing to thing. They take risks, sometimes calculated, sometimes gambling, but they they all They are quite entrepreneurial, because they're happy to sort of take on that and they'd be happy to invest and those sorts of things. Not every money personality is like that. And then you've got, if you contrast that with, say, the accumulator, who's all about managing risk, having loads of savings, not being in debt, not taking risks at all. And you put that with a maverick, you can see how that would cause a clash. If you you know, it's a bit like the security with the carefree or whatever. So, yeah, understanding your money personality in which one's predominantly impact on you. And if you can get your partner to do it as well, it's quite a girly one. So if you can get your partner's male partner, they might find it a bit girly. But if you can get that it's again, it's another way of opening up the conversation.

Tamsin Caine 20:46
And can you...? I'm assuming you wouldn't kind of go carefree to kind of safety, security, those extremes, but can you kind of care your archetype to sort of compensate for the fact that you're one way and your partners do the way?

Nikki Ramskill 21:09
Yeah, you absolutely can. And the power of understanding your archetype is if you understand how best you work. So if Mavericks love challenges, so I set myself goals, challenges about saving, investing, you know, those sorts of things, and that's how I operate. But somebody else it might be that they need to, you know, ring fence a bit of money for savings, or they need to ring fence a bit of money to have fun with as well as do everything else. So it's just your work to your strengths. So if you know that you've got an accumulator for a partner, and you are the opposite, and you're a spender, then you can both agree and say, Okay, we are allowed to spend money, it is okay to spend money, but we're just going to put a little ring fence around it, that's going to be our fun pot, of money, date, pot, whatever you want to call it. And then your partner is happy, because you're not spending out beyond that budget, you know, ideally not spending beyond that budget, and your partner. And you can also help your partner out by saying like, I agree to save X amount into our joint account, or, or whatever it is for us as a couple. So it's about understanding each other and flexing with that and saying, Okay, I understand your need for spending money, we're not going to stop you from spending money. So have this, we agree as a couple, we're allowed to do this. And we also agree that we save as well. So it's just it's just flexing with it a little bit and playing around with the ideas.

Tamsin Caine 22:32
That makes sense. So if you're, so we're, we're talking mainly to people who are probably at a point where they're single starting on a journey on their own, perhaps, who a lot of our listeners have never looked after money before? And how do they go about finding out what their archetype is? And when they know, how do they go about not letting that impact in the negative way on their financial future?

Nikki Ramskill 23:05
Yeah, so on my website, there is a quiz you can do. So it's the female money doctor.com/SMA-quiz.

Tamsin Caine 23:15
We will put that in the shownotes

Nikki Ramskill 23:19
Easier, isn't it? So when you do the quiz takes about seven minutes, and the questions will be things that will type you into each of these archetypes and then you'll get a breakdown. And you'll get your all eight of them all written down with a score next to them. And then after that, I give people three videos. The first is their strengths or their their kind of gifts if you like the second is their challenges. And the third is their alignment. So when you find out what your strengths are, and you find out what your challenges are, you might recognise yourself more than one over the other. So if you recognise yourself more in the challenges area, then you know that actually you just need to flip things a bit to work in your sort of lighter side of that, that personality. Each of them have got both light and dark sides. And then the alignment is around how you then manage your money to align with your money personality is no put like a romantic archetype is somebody who likes to spend money on the fine things they like luxury they like I deserve that piece of cake at the end of the week. I've had a hard week or I deserve that taxi because you know walking is gonna make me sweaty and hot and I just want to get there quickly. So that that's a romantic. Now if you try to get a romantic to use a spreadsheet, they're not going to do it. accumulators will be all over that spreadsheet. They will love it and they'll probably customise it and put all sorts of lovely funky colours on there and they'll enjoy doing it. Romantics will look at that and go I'll just have a copy of that place or can I have a notebook and a pen? Do it that way. So they're more likely to kind of go off the back of somebody else and the way they do or make it really simple because they don't like anything to be hard. So that's what I mean about alignment. It's like working with what you've got, rather than fighting against it, you know, there's no bad archetype everybody's equal. So if you come out as a romantic or a celebrity or an accumulator, none of that's bad.

Tamsin Caine 25:20
It's just a celebrity was celebrity archetype.

Nikki Ramskill 25:24
So the celebrity, again, a spender. They're spending is more about status. So it's not about luxury and ease and beautifulness. I mean, yes, they, they want the beautifulness to but it's about VIP. You know, what have I got that differentiates me from other people, it's the house, the car, the shoes, the handbag, the you know, it's that kind of lifestyle, anything with VIP on the front of it, they're all over it. Yeah, I want the VIP lounge at the airport, please, thank you very much. But in the same way that the romantic might have issues with the boundaries around it and overspending, they have the same problem. So that becomes the kind of background of both of those archetypes because you're funding a lifestyle that technically you can't afford. And again, celebrities are not likely to sit down with a spreadsheet and use it, they might do because we can't tell anyone with the same brush that every archetype, and your own expression of that will be slightly different. But you're more likely with it as a celebrity to have like a beautiful, luxurious notebook that you've got from some artisan fare in the middle of Greenwich or something, you know, like, it's that that would be the sort of thing you'd want to do. And, yeah, so it's just about working to your strengths and working to where you might find the hiccups and stopping yourself from going there.

Tamsin Caine 26:43
I like the sound of that sounds good. So you've figured out what your what your sacred money archetypes is, then where does your coaching come in.

Nikki Ramskill 26:58
So it depends on the person - some people want one to one coaching. And that's cool. We can use the knowledge of the archetypes to help to direct the coaching where you take it. So you might need to work really hard on your mindset, fine. That's what we would work on. Or like I've got an accumulator client at the moment. And she wants to work on investing because accumulators really struggle with with letting money go towards investing. So we said her goal for this coaching sessions is eventually I want to come out of this with an investment account set up, not that I'm going to tell her what to do, because I'm not an advisor. So I cannot say this account with this type of stocks fund or whatever, it's more about education, like these are the options you got and decide for yourself which one you want. And at the end of it, that's what you'll have. You know, it just it really much depends on the person and what they need. So that's, that's individual coaching. And then there's the kind of group stuff as well. So my archetypes coaching is in my membership. And that the membership is designed to help you navigate from not knowing what you're doing with your money at all through to I'm going to start a side hustle to bring more money in, and everything in between, like protections and wills, and all that stuff that goes along that. And the idea is once somebody knows they're archetypes, they can also watch the videos for every single archetype if they wanted to, because all of them are in there. And then they use that to decide how they're going to navigate through and then the rest.

Tamsin Caine 28:29
That's amazing. And so we were talking before we started recording, and you're still working as a doctor. Please just sort of blow my mind a little bit. And what, what sort of pulled you into getting involved in in being a Money Coach, how did you had to get into it?

Nikki Ramskill 28:56
Yeah, so the first thing I'm going to say is, that's my rule of personality. So rule is another one of the archetypes. Mavericks, my top risk taker, followed by the ruler who is the Empire Builder, so they like to they're very ambitious. So that's definitely where that comes from. But I when I first realised that I was in a money pit, I learned from other people so I learned from other coaches and bloggers and gurus and always different people that have got books like Robert Kiyosaki his books and Ann Wilson and Dave Ramsay, all of these are really big names in the industry. And it's only until I went back to work after a bit of a break that I then realised that my patients and my colleagues were having similar problems. It's just that we didn't really talk about it or you didn't really notice it because you're so caught up in their medical medical issue. You don't know that there's a money problem behind it or a potential future money problem because they're sick now and it will lead to problems later. So from there I realised that I had something that I could talk about. So health and wealth perspective, started blogging about it called it the female only doctor blog. And then from there realised, actually hang on a second, there are people out there called Money Coaches, and recently, financial counsellors thought, Wow, this sounds amazing. So I learned more about that. And here I am. So you know, because I can see the the interplay between the two, it's, it's so intertw ined. It's, you know, it just feels natural to talk about it.

Tamsin Caine 30:33
Yeah, absolutely. And talking about money is something we don't do, do we, you know, in the UK, it's like, it's offensive to discuss money. It's, we shouldn't talk about how much we earned. You probably more happy talking about sex with the girlfriends than you are of money.

Nikki Ramskill 30:55
Or your own death. Apparently, there was a research, we're more likely to talk about our own death and money. So yeah.

Tamsin Caine 31:03
We, yeah, we massively have to change it change this, I think, because I think there'll be more shame around money, until we start talking about it properly and openly and being happy to just be a bit more open about situations that we get ourselves at just, I've just felt like maybe people will get themselves into less bad financial situations if they were just able to talk more openly about money.

Nikki Ramskill 31:34
Yeah, and it's also learning about it as well. It's the it's the education stuff. So yes, it might come back to schools doing it. But I think the more of us that can learn for ourselves, the more we can pass on to the younger generations, you don't have to have kids to do that. You might be nieces, nephews, good, good children. But we can make that change happen, particularly as women because we're the ones that tend to take on most of the Child Care and you know, generally still in our society, that's what it's all about. But hopefully, that will change. But for now, we can be the ones that pass on the good habit. So if we can take responsibility for ourselves, particularly at times around divorce, and suddenly, when we're left on our own thinking, how are we going to do this? It's a great time to learn about it and gain confidence.

Tamsin Caine 32:23
Yeah absolutely. And I think if you, if you do take anything away from getting divorced, or coming out for a relationship, if it's been the opportunity to learn about money, and to have a better understanding, and start taking control, at least might be something positive come in, coming from it. So have you got any hints or tips or anything you want to leave our audience with today.

Nikki Ramskill 32:55
So I think when you when you come out of a relationship, and you're suddenly having to do this yourself, it can feel really scary and really overwhelming. So I think, acknowledge that it's normal, we are all going to feel like that, particularly if we haven't had that control. And the thing that I did was to get help. And for me, it started off by reading books, listening to podcasts, you know, going on people's websites and reading their articles about how to get out of debt. Then it progressed to, I'm going to go and do that course, or I'm going to hire that person to help me do something. And again, that's not a bad thing, either. And I think we've got this aversion to spending money on ourselves when it comes to these sorts of things, you know, particularly in the UK, when it comes to money and our health because we've got the NHS to help us. We don't have to pay for that at the point where we need the care. And I think that extrapolates to other things as well that why should we have to pay for somebody to help us with our debts or budgets or investing? Actually, sometimes you do need to you do need that help you you know, you've you've paid for a gardener to help you with the thing that you don't feel confident with. So why do we not do that around our money, it's so I think we have to be prepared to put some skin in the game and actually learned for ourselves about what we need to do. And not just look at all the free stuff all the time because there's a limit to how much free stuff is going to help you because sometimes you do need to make it more bespoke and you need to go deeper on a subject. And then the second thing is actually giving yourself time to do that. Because we carry so much of the mental load and we carry so much of the burden around what we need to do in the house and the finances for today. Like the budget for the groceries or whatever, we're not thinking long term. So if you give yourself the time to do that, which is what I had the luxury of when I had that break in my career. That's when I realised the problems with it. That's when I realised I had to make a change it was because I took time out to stop and think. So give yourself that time, you know, learn from other people and take the time to do it as well. So I would say they, they're my my tips around it.

Tamsin Caine 35:11
I love it, great advice. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been really lovely to talk to.

Nikki Ramskill 35:17
So welcome. Thank you for having me.

Tamsin Caine 35:23
I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you did, please do think about writing us a review or giving us a lovely five star rating on iTunes, if that's where you're listening. Hope you'll join us again next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai