Emotionally Invested

In this episode of Emotionally Invested, I look at why we compare ourselves to other people, what it does to us psychologically and financially, and what actually helps us stop. I also put real numbers on where UK incomes sit nationally and globally, because the data often tells a very different story from how we feel. What we cover Where the comparing instinct comes from, including Leon Festinger...

The Machine Will See You Now Last month, Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, moved into financial advice. It launched a new tool for advisers, and early versions of its app show a feature that would let you link your bank accounts and ask Claude about your money. So will AI replace financial advisers? I think that's the wrong question. The better one is: what part of financial a...

Bar a life partner, buying a home is the biggest emotional purchase most of us will ever make. In this episode I go through what you actually need to know about UK housing and mortgages right now — the mechanics, and the psychology underneath them that most financial content skips entirely. In this episode: Where UK mortgage rates actually stand today, and why chasing the "right moment" to buy is...

Everyone obsesses over which stock to pick or when to time the market — but the research says the real driver of your investment outcome is something far less exciting: how you split your money across asset classes in the first place. In this episode, we trace asset allocation back to its unlikely origin — a 25-year-old graduate student named Harry Markowitz who, in 1952, was the first person to m...

In this episode The regret that came up more than any other — and what it means for financial plans built around someone else's expectations Why "I wish I hadn't worked so hard" showed up in every man Ware cared for The connection between undiscussed finances and undiscussed feelings What 85 years of Harvard data say about relationships, wealth, and what actually predicts a long, happy life Scotti...

How Much Time Do You Actually Have Left? In this episode, I look at why our internal sense of time is so unreliable — why the years speed up as we get older, why the future always feels blurrier and more distant than it actually is, and why the things that matter most (a parent, a child, a friendship) so easily lose out to things with a deadline attached, purely because they don't have one. Then t...

Tax is a very current hot topic and always a very emotive one. We do not like paying tax but we do have some control in this. We need to be thinking about making ourselves as tax-efficient and savvy as possible. Paying tax unnecessarily is wasteful and it is in this space, where we can minimise the tax we paid personally or if we have our own businesses. In this episode, I cover some of the basics...

The bad news is we all have these money scripts. The good news is once we understand which ones we have, we can do something to shift our behaviours (if they are not really serving us). A money script is an unconscious, deeply held belief about money that is typically formed in childhood. First coined by financial psychologist Dr. Brad Klontz, these ingrained scripts run on autopilot and directly...

As part of building your financial house and its foundations, I take a look at the basics regarding protection of your most valuable asset; YOU! You are a money-making machine, with unlimited upside potential, and this needs to be taken care of. Please like and subscribe or get in touch with me, at adrian@eqfinancialplanning.com

Following on from the spending plan creation, to fully maximise and bring your plans to life, we need to reconcile how we spend our time and money versus our values. Here I introduce another exercise that can provide you with an operating system on how you can make all kinds of life decisions, not just money ones. The Values List: https://brenebrown.com/resources/dare-to-lead-list-of-values/

After hearing that Modern Wisdom (my fave podcast) has an annual review template I decided to check it out and do it out loud. Unfiltered and off the cuff responses to a lot of great questions is what follows. I did actually do my own in December but this was fun too and could be useful for people if they are interested in reflection. I've actually just checked my 2026 plans to see if I am on trac...

Lets think about budgeting. I prefer the term spending plan, as for me, it creates real agency on how we allocate our financial resources. So many tools out there, if you are old school (like me), I prefer writing or keying my data. The best spreadsheet I have seen is this one: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/budget-planning/ I like this version from a Canadian firm on the Financial Plan...

We have had a bumpy 6 weeks in global markets. This is entirely normal and its part of the investment journey but its hard to block out the media noise. What are some of the golden rules we need to think about when investing?

An introduction to what Emotionally Invested will be about. Two episodes a month, covering all things money and life.