The Happy Saver Podcast - Personal Finance in New Zealand · Ruth - Personal Finance Blogger

102. Once you have won the money game, stop and enjoy life.

·1 hr 1 min·4 clips

Their net worth was over £2 million, about £1 million more than staying with the adviser’s funds.

1. The Happy Saver Podcast episode focuses on Alan and Katie Donegan, the Rebel Finance School founders who reached financial independence and later travelled to New Zealand. 2. Ruth is the host and personal finance blogger in Aotearoa, while Alan and Katie are the guests because they built a free 10-week money course and retired early. 3. The episode asks what happens after someone wins the money game and chooses to enjoy life instead of chasing more income. 4. Ruth says Katie grew up on the outskirts of West London and Alan grew up in Hampshire, near a village south-west of London with only a pub and a train station. 5. Katie says her parents never told her the family finances, but she learned to live below her means and pay off her credit card in full each month. 6. Alan describes a childhood swing from Bentleys and Mercedes to yard sales and car boot sales after his father lost everything and went to prison. 7. Alan says his father persuaded him to invest about £7,000 of teen savings into an actively managed high-growth technology fund before the dot-com bubble burst. 8. Alan says 90% of that money evaporated overnight, and that experience frightened him away from the stock market for years. 9. Katie says Alan's life changed after someone handed him a small self-development book around age 20 and told him to read it. 10. Katie and Alan met in Costa Rica in 2005, when she was 20 and he was 26, even though they lived only 37 miles apart in the UK. 11. Katie says she was recovering from burnout and depression after her second year at Oxford University, while Alan was dealing with family breakdown and the fallout from his father's alcoholism and violence. 12. Katie later studied statistics, became an actuary in life insurance, and used student loans, an overdraft, and holiday work to clear debt each year. 13. Alan says he refused the idea that one partner should control the money, because his father gave his mother housekeeping money and kept the rest. 14. Katie says their early shared goal was saving for a house deposit, and Alan says they had to manage finances together so both partners understood the numbers. 15. Alan and Katie bought a two-bedroom flat in 2010 for £168,000 with a 25% deposit of £42,000, then later bought two studio flats for £104,000 each. 16. Katie says a financial adviser put her into two low-risk funds after asking about risk in ways that confused volatility with loss. 17. Katie calculates that staying with the old managed funds would have left them just under £1 million, while their current index-fund approach has taken them over £2 million. 18. Alan and Katie say they are not anti-property, but pro-maths, and they warn that people often bank on price rises instead of checking returns and liquidity. 19. The episode feels like a long, conversational kitchen-table interview, with Ruth interrupting herself for sponsor messages, personal asides, and direct follow-up questions. 20. People interested in FIRE, index funds, and couple money management will get the most from it, while listeners wanting a fast property-only episode may skip it.

As heard by us

A calm investing lesson that turns one couple's money journey into plain advice.

Ruth walks Alan and Katie Donegan's money story from overpaying a mortgage to learning how share-market investing felt less like guesswork and more like a next step.

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Why you'd press play

You want a clearer way to think about risk and volatility.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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