– Welcome everybody to today’s Building My Legacy podcast. I have with me today, Dr. Nikki Ramskill. She is a women’s health care specialist in the NH System in the British healthcare system. So you’re located, are you in London or where in Britain are you?

– Not far from London. I’m about an hour outside of London towards the North.

– And she’s fascinating because she has done what I hear many people beginning to talk about and that is how do I plan for a legacy now while I’m in my career and begin to really lay the foundation of that? And so she’s a practicing specialist in women’s health care. And while she’s been doing that has decided to address some very specific issues that she saw her patients coming in with and presenting within the clinic. And so I want her to share with you her journey, what got her to the place that she’s at? And then we’ll talk a little bit about what she’s doing to address those issues. So Nikki, welcome to our podcast today.

– Thank you so much for having me. It’s great.

– So share with our audience, your journey, if you would please?

– So I am now 35 and when I turned 30, I had a bit of a we call it early midlife crisis or late quarter life crisis, something like that. And something I didn’t expect to have, but it hit me really hard. And I was in the job at the time. It was really stressful. If you know anything about healthcare systems and obstetrics and gynecology in particular in America you’d call it an OB-GYN. You know, it’s very, very hard work. It’s adrenaline fuels very emotional and it’s draining. And I got to a stage where I thought I can’t do this anymore. So I decided to come out of that for a while, had some time to think I went and did some traveling for about five months or so. And that gave me the time to think about my life, my career, the journey that I was on was actually what I wanted, because I realized that actually my personality didn’t actually suit what I was doing at the time. And it didn’t actually give me the lifestyle I wanted either. I wanted freedom. And I think that trip away kind of really highlighted to me how much I value freedom, how much I value my own freedom. So I came back from that trip and realized not only was I in a career situation that I didn’t wanna be in, but I was also in the money situation I didn’t wanna be in. And I started to learn how to get myself out of debt, how to invest, budgeting all these very basic things that probably should have learnt when I was younger, but didn’t and everything that I had done to that point was just random. And I just did whatever I felt like doing. So I had nothing to show for the fact that I was a doctor in a, you know, actually a really respected career. So I started doing all those things. And then when I actually went back into work again, I didn’t want to go back into obstetrics and gynecology. I decided to become a family physician because I missed the care of other people, not just women. I missed caring for the elderly, caring for children, caring for men. So for me, moving was the right call. And also it meant that I could have the freedom that I wanted as well which is of highest value. But when I went back into that work again, I realized that actually hang on there are all these people that have got issues with their money that are impacting on their health. So they’ll come in and they’ll say to them, you need to have six weeks off because you’ve done this. Or you need to have time off work cause you’re stressed. And they just look at you kind of, how am I gonna do that financially? They couldn’t because they didn’t have the ability to sort that out. And then I’d see other people that had these awful situations. They might be in their mid 30s, something’s happened. They’ve had a car accident or they’ve got cancer, or you know, and they die and they’ve got no will, they’ve got children that have got no money, to kind of live off their partners. Now have got to give up work to look after children and financially the family is a complete chaos. So what and how I started to see these things, I thought hang on, I can do something here. As a family doctor, I feel like it’s my responsibility to actually share what I’m learning, because there are so many people that are suffering from poor money management that’s impacting on their health care. We’re lucky in the UK, we’ve got free healthcare at the point of views. We still have to pay for for our taxes but at the point of actually needing help, we don’t have all these big bills coming to us at the end of that term. But we still have to do some things to help ourselves which means having money set aside as an emergency making sure we’ve got money set aside for our retirement, having insurances in place, if we can’t work, you know all of these things are so important. So I set up a blog called The Female Money Doctor, and I pulled everything into that, that I’ve been learning so far. So there we go.

– So how do you become a money expert? So finance is a little bit different from the science like chemistry, biology, biochemistry, anatomy, physiology, that is so much a part of medical school education. So how did you make that transition? Where did you go to get that base of information?

– So for me, I love learning and I think all doctors will say that to you. We’re constantly learning all the time, we have to as part of our job, but also I think we just like to make sure we understand what’s going on. So I applied the same principles to learning about my money. And that came from, you know looking at podcasts, listening to podcasts, looking at other people’s blogs, attending courses, just getting an idea about how other people manage money and then applying it to my own practices. And then I also did some training to become a Sacred Money Archetypes coach, and that comes from a woman called Kendall SummerHawk based in America. And it’s all about how our money, personality influences everything that we do. So pulling all of these strands together, coming from my own medical background, what I understand of stress mental health and how I managed to break down quite complicated concepts into easy to digest chunks. I think all of that is what I bring to it. So that’s how I’ve come to kind of transition if you like, I’m still helping people. I’m still breaking down hard concepts that I’m just now applying it to money as opposed to the human body.

– So what have you found are the biggest challenges people face as you talk with them?

– I think what Corona virus has really highlighted is how people are not prepared for financial emergencies. And I suppose in a way I was quite fortunate. It’s not really the right word but being involved in healthcare means you’re exposed to the worst things that happen to people. So, you know, cancer, people dying unexpectedly, all of these, these horrible things that can happen to people. And that really brought home to me the things like having a will, making sure that I’ve got retirement savings, making sure I’ve got insurances in place to cover me at work. But I think a lot of people don’t have that because they haven’t got that exposure. They go through life relatively. They don’t have any bad things necessarily happen to them that much. It hasn’t really impacted them. Coronavirus has affected everybody. It’s literally affected everything that we do. And it’s really highlighted to those who have lost their jobs or have been furloughed or their income has dropped, that actually they don’t have the resources around them. So I think that’s what’s led to an increase in people coming to find individuals like me to learn how to better prepare themselves financially in case another disaster happens. And it won’t be a Coronavirus, it will be a personal disaster, a family disaster or whatever it is, we have to be prepared.

– So you talked about a financial, did you say architecture for is the process that you used or your personal architecture? I don’t quite remember the term that you used.

– Archetypes.

– Archetypes. And so explain a little bit about what that is. What do you mean by that?

– So there are, in the theory, there are eight personality types that relate to money in a particular way. There are no bad archetypes. There are no good archetypes. It’s just how we are. And how we do money is how we do literally everything. And that’s actually one of Kendall’s stock phrases that she loves to use. And it’s so true when you actually find, out your own personality you start to see similarities in all sorts of things. All of them can impact us, but the ones that we come out with the top three out of that list are the ones that have the most influence. And once you learn that, you can then start to see why you might’ve been sabotaging yourself, why you might not have been growing wealth in a particular way because you like to spend it in a certain way. You’re not one of these natural savers. Cause there are natural saver archetypes as well. And it might be you’re one of those personality types that just can’t handle the idea of managing money. And you want to give it away to somebody else, so you’d rather just ignore it and hope it just goes away. It sorts itself out. So all of these personality types can exist in all of us but it’s just what we have the most ready access to. And this can be influenced by so many things, especially when we have children and what our parents taught us about money, both you know, in the flesh, this is how you manage money and subconsciously how they were managing money.

– So when you work with somebody, Nikki, where do you begin? How do you begin this discussion?

– So the first thing I get them to do is complete their quiz because if they do the quiz, which actually doesn’t take very long, they then find out their break down of all of those eight archetypes. And as I said, the top three are the ones that have the most influence on us. So the next thing I would then get them to do is to listen to their gifts. So I help people think about the gifts of their archetypes, what they architects are good at, so what their zone of genius is and how they manage money well? And then look at what they’re not so good at. So what are the challenges? What does the archetype tend to do that actually doesn’t serve them? And if they spend more time in that part of the archetype they’re actually going to do their money a disservice. And then after that, we look at how we can then align those characteristics with wealth? So how do we actually get to that path of wealth? Everyone needs to know what direction they’re going in, but the path will look very different for different people. So you’re still honoring and appealing to your archetype but you’re not doing it like everybody else, because you can’t do it like everybody else. Everyone’s different.

– Everyone is so very different. Aren’t they? So as you look at those differences and as people, you talk with people, they also come with different challenges. What are you seeing as the impact on people’s health? Are you seeing a correlation now with what you’re doing in people’s health, how has that translated for you?

– It can translate in lots of ways. I mean, particularly people feeling stressed about their work and then stressed about money. So if that’s the first thing you think about when you wake up and the last thing you think about when you go to sleep you’re not necessarily gonna get a great night sleep, but also it’s going to stop you from thinking more positively. So it kind of shuts down your ability to reason your way out of a problem or think laterally outside of a problem because you’re so focused and so worried about the thing that’s causing the problem right now and that would be lack of money or debt or whatever it is, but I’m also seeing it in the way that people kind of, they just restrict, they don’t want to do anything. They kind of want to hold onto their money and not actually carry on with all those lovely plans that they might’ve had pre-COVID. COVID is not gonna go away anytime soon. If you’ve got these grand plans of wanting to leave your career or going up the ladder and actually achieving something that you’ve always wanted to, but you need to perhaps go and get a degree to do that or you need to learn something new. Why not do that? It’s not going away. So you may as well still carry on with your plans as best as you can around the circumstances that we’ve got. So it’s the two ways, it’s the feeling restricted but it’s also the worry as well.

– Worry is huge. I think if there’s anything I’ve heard during the COVID and now in the post-COVID period is almost now there’s more anxiety because it’s like, I thought it was gonna get better and it hasn’t gone away yet. And so it’s, you know I still have to hunker down and somehow cope with this. And so it’s that reality orientation that I think is difficult for people. Are you able to do this in the clinic setting or do you do this all online? How do you go about letting people know that you have this available for them?

– So I do everything online. I mean, as a family doctor we don’t get a lot of time. I can do little bits with people on the phone if let’s say they’ve got depression and actually money is one of the big problems with it, cause often money can lead to mental illness but mental illness can also lead to money problems. It’s kind of a two way street. So some people just need that little bit more of advice. And I might signpost them, direct them to something, because I keep my NHS work and my online world quite separate because there’s lots of rules around promotion and things like that. So for me, I operate online very separately to my actual medical work. But I’ve used some of my tips and tricks to kind of just gently push somebody in a direction that might help them with their finances if that’s something that they’ve brought to the table when we have a discussion, but for everybody else, it’s all online because we’re in that world now where we need to be online. I would love to be face-to-face with people, but we just, it’s just not safe right now.

– So when people get this information, what’s their response. Do you see, are they able to take hold and make changes? What are you seeing happening?

– I think it depends on the type of person that you speak to. I’ve had some people that we talk through a strategy maybe to get out of debt or something like that. And you can see that physical weight, just I’ve offloaded that problem and wow, now I can think clearly. And sometimes it just helps to have someone to spar ideas with. That’s how I see myself as a money coach. It’s the, who you would go to when you’re at the gym, you know, you don’t get the person to do the work for you. You ask them for some ideas, they give you some suggestions and you take away from that, what you want to. So it’s really lovely to see when somebody takes something on board and they, oh, they just relax, it’s amazing. You do have some people that you give suggestions to and they say, yeah, but well I can’t do that, but no I can’t do that either. And that’s where you’ve got to actually listen to your language and think, hang on a second, I’m using the word but a lot here, why am I holding myself back? What are the excuses and why am I putting barriers in the way? And that can come from the subconscious fears about success or fears about failure that are impacting on what we’re feeling we’re able to do.

– Do you think people are today more ready to have this conversation than they were pre-COVID?

– Yes, I think so. I think what’s happened is it’s just made people very aware of the holes in their finances. And I think that’s leading more and more people to actually pay attention to what’s currently going on right now. So yes, absolutely. I think there is a lot more attention on money now.

– So as you think about the people who are listening to us today, what would you say are the top three to five things people should think about? If they’re sitting and listening how do they assess where they’re at and what steps they should be taking next?

– So I often think of the steps to wealth as a kind of incremental things you need to learn in order to just get to the next stage. There’s no point thinking I wanna be at step number 10 when actually you’re on step number one. So the first thing is to not think about where you wanna be for retirement or whatever it is think about what’s going on right now. So that would be looking at your money and deciding have I got enough money coming in right now to cover my expenses? So what I often get the people in my community to do is look through bank statements and start to assess which things absolutely cannot go right now. This is what’s heating my house, putting the roof over my head, keeping me secure. What can I get rid of temporarily? Perhaps it’s the TV packages, perhaps it’s the going to get your nails done getting the coffees or whatever it is, these things you might temporarily be able to get rid of. If you’re finding that your income is not actually stretching far enough. And then once you’ve got to that point and you’re giving every dollar that you’ve got or every pound a job, you can then stretch to something else. Now what about my savings? So you’ve looked at your income and outgoings. How are my savings doing? Have I got enough to cover me for a month if I wasn’t able to work? What about two months? How many months do I need to have in savings to make me feel secure so that if I lose my job, I can then feel okay. And if you don’t have huge amounts of money right now maybe you need to actually rent that wealth first by getting, I don’t know whether you’ve got this in America, but income protection insurance, or some way of filling in that gap between you not being able to work and being able to pay your bills. And if you haven’t got the money there, it might be worth actually getting that insurance in place to cover you until you do. So then you, you know, if it’s six months or whatever you know that you’re fine and you’re covered. But at the very least having a thousand pounds in a savings account, there’s so many people in the UK don’t even have a thousand pounds to actually help them in any kind of emergency that’s going on. You often need more than a thousand pounds but that’s a good place to start, if you’ve got no savings at all. So that would be the other place to look. And then the other, the final part of this is looking at your future. So yes you’re looking at the here and now but what about when you want to retire? Do you have something in place that is going to pay the bills when you want to stop working? Because if you don’t, you’re going to have to rely on handouts, family members, or you might not even have anything, you’ll have to just carry on working. You know, you might not be able to even stop. So it’s having one eye on the future and one eye on what’s going on right now but not neglecting one for the other. So often what I see is a lot of women will get rid of their pension at work because it frees up money to be able to pay the bills right now. I get that, I understand that because it’s a financial stress and I’ve been tempted in the past to give up on a pension but I’ve never stopped paying into a pension because I know how important that is for my old age. So it’s those three parts of it, I would say.

– So you talk about people who are financially stressed and who really aren’t, don’t have a seemingly the ability to manage their money. So how did they, so my question is how do you find them and begin this conversation? Cause part of what I have seen is when people are financially stressed, they also don’t often tend to be looking outward for help. There’s a depression that sets in and it’s more anger that’s turned inward, than that outward searching. So what’s been your experience with that?

– Yeah, there’s a huge amount of emotional stuff around money. You know, we don’t just look at money as the tool it is, we look at money as, you know a bad thing or a good thing or a stressful thing or whatever it is we apply to it. So I set up a Facebook group for women that want to talk to other women about money. I mean, I read a statistic recently that said that 61% of women would rather talk about their death than money. So it’s amazing. So I’ve set up a private Facebook group for people purely just to have these conversations to ask questions about their money, to just say, look this sounds like a stupid question, but you know nothing is a stupid question, but we often feel that we can’t turn to any of our friends because none of our friends necessarily know or we don’t feel that we can open up to them because we might have a debt problem. And actually we might feel ashamed by that. So having a safe, supportive group of friends that can actually talk it through with you is something that I’ve always wanted in my Facebook group. So it’s a very safe space. And if anybody goes against that, they get taken out of the group very quickly. So it’s kept very safe and secure for people to open up.

– So what a gift that is to people because I think you’re absolutely right. There’s almost this unwritten rule. You can have any problem, you can ask for help in almost any area, but don’t ask for it relative to money.

– Exactly. Exactly. And it’s very difficult. I’ve had lots of difficult conversations with ex partners you know, having to confess to them that I had debt. I mean, thankfully I haven’t any more, but when I was in a lot of debt, having to own up to that felt really shameful because I had this thing in my head of I’m a doctor. I should be together. I should have my money sorted, everything should be okay. Why isn’t it? And then there’s that fear of what people are gonna think of me and just feeling just generally like I’d failed in everything. But that’s just my brain doing that. That’s not actually true. That’s not reality. And once I had confessed, it made life so much easier because suddenly the expectation wasn’t there for me to pay into our joint account in the same way, because he knew I had to pay my debts off first and once they were paid of then it was much easier. So yeah, definitely worth opening up.

– So part of what you’re talking about is, especially if you’re in a relationship, having those really difficult conversations about how you prioritize where money is gonna go presently and for the future. Am I right in hearing that?

– Yeah, absolutely. It’s a constant battle. I would say. I mean, if you’ve got a lot of money coming in that’s great. But if you are then increasing your lifestyle, we’ve got a thunderstorm going on behind me. This is amazing. If your lifestyle increases with that, then you’re no better off than somebody that owns less, but has more in their pocket. So it’s also about being very mindful of how you’re spending and making sure you are putting some of that aside. So yeah, I agree.

– With that mindfulness and the planning, isn’t it? That catches us all in life. I think people have also felt overwhelmed. It’s like, how do I just trying to figure out how to survive. I’ve gotta check on family members. I don’t dare go out. I have a pre-existing condition. So I don’t wanna become vulnerable. So we have a list in our head. And I think money has moved to the bottom of that list, as survival has risen to the top of the list. And that’s been through COVID I believe. And then I think people who have corporate positions, know every day I have it today but will I have a position tomorrow? Because you don’t know, you don’t know what the company’s ability to rebound will be. So there’s that nine piece. And then you have the finance on top of it, which adds to a lot of stress, doesn’t it?

– Yeah, absolutely. And I think while those stresses are around, I think that should be rather than an additional thing to be stressed about. I think it should be a motivation to put money aside. So as much as you possibly can, because if you think there’s any chance that you might lose your job, then what are you doing to prepare for that? There’s no harm in preparing for it. And then if you keep your job and everything’s fine, great you’ve prepared money that you didn’t actually need but may need in the future. So it’s kind of doing everything you possibly can right now to keep yourself safe, as much as possible.

– Nikki your time goes quickly. Anything we have missed that we should have talked about that you hear from people that’s important to them, that they wish they would have known about or thought about or had a chance to talk about what have we not talked about?

– Well, I think one of the things I hear a lot from people is I wish I’d known about this when I was younger. And I’ve said that to myself so many times, I wish I’d learned how to invest when I was 18. I wish I’d put some of my money aside when I was earning it right from the start. So actually, if you learn how to do this yourself and you feel secure in yourself and you have that money, or doing the things you want it to do, make sure your kids understand that too. And I know it’s difficult to teach children. I’ve got a daughter and she hasn’t listened to half the things that we say, but it’s showing them it’s showing them what the options are for them, how to manage money, what the different terminologies mean? So for me I think women are best placed for that, cause we often are the ones that are looking after children. So we’re the key to helping younger generations through. Cause they can be at much more advantage than us if we teach them and we get things in place early. So that’s what I would say.

– So for those of you who are listening, we will have information about Nikki, the money doctor in the just you can go there and get some information about her. There will be information about how to connect and contact her and feel free to do so, if you would like some help connecting just let us know we’ll be glad to do that. Nikki, thank you so much for your time today and for being with us and sharing with us this new journey that you have entered upon and the legacy you’re leaving for many, many many families and individuals as they move through life. So thank you.

– Thank you so much for having me, really enjoyed talking to you. I can’t believe it’s gone so fast.