I was eleven, it was a Tuesday, and there was a letter on the kitchen table that somebody had to read out loud. My parents' English was good. The letter was not in English. It was in bank.
The letters
There were a lot of them over the years and I got quick at them. Arrears notice, variable rate, minimum payment, subject to status. What I worked out somewhere around thirteen was not anything about money. It was that the difficulty was manufactured — that somebody had chosen every one of those words, and the choosing had a direction to it.
That is the thing I have been annoyed about ever since, and it turns out you can build a whole job on being annoyed about one thing.
Nine years of teaching it wrong
I trained as a math teacher and spent nine years in a comprehensive in Birmingham. I was good at it. My pupils could factorize a quadratic, find a gradient, and calculate compound interest to three decimal places.
Not one of them knew that the last of those was the same thing as their sister's credit card.
That is not a criticism of the curriculum, or not only. Compound interest is in the curriculum. What is not in it is the ten minutes afterwards where somebody says: this is the thing on the letter, this is why the balance went up when you paid it, this is what to do. Ten minutes. Nobody had the ten minutes, including me, because there was a scheme of work and it did not have a box for it.
They can all do compound interest. Not one of them knows it is the same thing as their credit card.
A spare room, and a video about pensions
I started posting two-minute explanations in 2021, mostly because I was tired of saying the same things at parents' evening. Whiteboard, phone on a stack of books, one idea each.
The one about what a pension actually is — not what to do with it, just what the thing is — was watched four million times in a fortnight.
And the surprise was who watched it. I had assumed I was making things for people like my sixth-formers. The messages were from people in their forties and fifties. People with two pensions from two old jobs and no idea whether that was a problem. People who had been quietly assuming for twenty years that everybody else had been given a leaflet they had somehow missed.
Nobody got the leaflet. There is no leaflet.
How this is paid for
Advertising on the show, two books, and speaking. That is the entire list and I would rather put it on the page than have you wonder.
Not a course. Not a membership. Not a community. Not a fund, not a platform, not a referral fee, not an affiliate link — not on the show, not in the letter, not on this website. I have never recommended a financial product by name and I am not going to start, because the moment I do, every episode I have ever made about that category becomes something you have to second-guess.
The show is free and it stays free. That is written into the terms rather than just said here, which is the difference between a promise and a slogan.
Write to me
`yara [at] commonerwealth.example` — written out like that because the scrapers are relentless and I would rather keep answering.
I read everything. I reply to most of it, eventually, and "eventually" is honest: a short question usually gets a short answer within the week. What I cannot do is tell you what to do with your own money — that is advice, it is regulated, and I am a teacher rather than an adviser. If you ask me how something works, though, that is the whole job and I will take as long as it needs.
