And what would you say your normal kind of timescale would be? Three years, five years, less than that?

I’ve never thought it is a subject that should be introduced later. It’s such a part of our life. You know, the reason I think I’ve been good with money is that we didn’t have any when I was tiny and it was a big conversation in the house and it wasn’t in a worrying way. It was just like, what are we gonna do to build a better life? And I think that was a real gift because I didn’t learn about money, you know, I just absorbed about it. And I thought, it’s not even in the school curriculum. And how can this lifeblood of the way our entire society works, how can that not be on the school curriculum from the day they first step foot over that school threshold? So I thought, well, well, there’s a gap. It needs to be written. Whether or not I’m the person to write it or not, we’ll see. In this investment masterclass, I get to grill her about what we can learn from her mean but green investment approach, scaling up a side hustle and why she wants to teach seven-year-olds more about their money.

Cookies on the FT

You can earn, like, profits from the properties that you sell, and then you build up, like, different clients’ houses as well. When you consider all the other things much younger children are already doing online by then, these age limits seem increasingly out of step. Claer Barrett’s two-year-old niece gets to grips with a pain aux raisins — after having tapped Claer’s bank card to pay for it No, when I was a personal finance journalist, my credit score was absolutely appalling. So I totally get that. (laughter)

It is not. Well, yeah, my normal books, well, my normal books are children’s picture books. So I think my first ever book was about a frog who has lots of baby brothers and sisters and is slightly traumatised, but then learns to love it. I’ve, (laughter) I’ve done many more picture books since then, so I think my picture books outnumber my finance books by about 11 to 1. So yeah, so it will, the interest will change over time depending on inflation. So right now it looks appalling and hopefully it will start to look better. But the bright side is that it doesn’t operate like a normal loan. Like if you’re struggling, if you’ve not got a job . . .

Retailers:

Other than forging cheques, it would have been great to learn something about pensions and why they’re important so that, you know, when I did have the opportunity to pay into a pension at the FT, I knew that it was, it actually made sense to kind of pay in as much as I possibly could to get the matching contributions from my employer. A further tip from me: reinvesting any dividends rather than spending them will help your investments grow and compound faster. Listen to a recent investment masterclass with Lord John Lee. For more on this, there’s a link in today’s show notes. Well, I think some interesting companies at the moment are the big oil and gas companies. There’s a lot of pessimism about whether they’ll be able to stay in business in the future because obviously the energy transition is something that has to happen.