Hi, I'm Nick.

I'm a chartered accountant in the UK. In my 20s I didn't know much about finance and assumed things would always just work out. At 30, I retrained as an accountant and read every tried-and-tested finance book I could find — I wanted to learn how to master my finances, rather than have them master me. This site is what I wish I'd known when I was starting out: it's what I'd want to hand to a friend who asked "where do I even start?"

So here you'll find the finance principles, in plain English, with the spreadsheets I actually use. There's no judgement here, just a hope that what took me twenty years to learn helps you learn it in a month. As I've said elsewhere on this site, your finances really are just a series of small decisions — the problem is that they multiply over time. Warren Buffett (the world-famous investor — Google him if the name doesn't ring a bell) was once asked about his success, and why more people don't simply copy it. He said something to the effect of, "I came up with a get-rich-slow scheme." That's the trouble with most of personal finance: it takes good decisions, and a good amount of time.

This site isn't about investing brilliantly or getting seriously wealthy. It's about helping you understand the decisions that matter, and giving you the tools you need to act on them. There aren't many of them — but you do have to actually do them. I've built a few simple tools to help: a budgeting spreadsheet (working out what's coming in and planning what goes out) and a personal balance sheet (what you own versus what you owe), each available on their own, plus a weekly tracker and monthly report that come together with both of them in the complete toolkit.

I hope you find the site useful. Do reach out if it's helped — I like hearing where it's made a difference, and readers' stories are what bring that to life. I also want to know what we're not doing well, so we can improve it. This site exists to help; if it isn't doing that, we want to change it.