THE PHASE PULSE
In my twenties my head was completely full. Building a career, working every hour, learning how to be an adult. I had started a pension, which felt like the responsible thing, and as far as I knew it was the whole of it. Money was going somewhere sensible. That seemed like enough.
In my thirties it was babies. Prams, cots, sleepless nights, and the enormous logistical operation of small children. The pension kept going quietly in the background. I was entirely rooted in the present, which is where small children keep you, and the future was something I contributed to rather than something I thought about.
Then I turned forty, and something shifted. Not the busyness. That got worse. There are still children, still work, and now perimenopause arriving in the middle of it with its own particular fog.
What shifted was the arithmetic. I was suddenly closer to retiring than to starting, and I realised I could not tell you a single thing about where the twenty years of contributions had been investing into.
Here is what I notice looking back. There was never a decade where my head was empty. My financial future was so easy to leave for later as it felt like another thing to learn in an already packed schedule.
The present was always louder. There was always something that needed me now, while the future felt comfortably far away. Until one day, it didn’t. The thing I had been putting off for later had quietly become now.
THE LESSON
I want to say something clearly, because I think this carries a lot of shame for women.
When investing gets put off, it is rarely because someone cannot do it.
It is because there is no room.
Capacity and capability are not the same thing, and we confuse them constantly.
A woman in her twenties working every hour to establish herself is not lacking the ability to understand markets. Neither is the woman in her thirties running a household on broken sleep, or the woman in her forties holding a career, a family and her own health together at once.
None of them lack the ability. What they lack is the room to think about it.
Not the hour. The room.
So it gets handed over. To a partner, to a default fund, to a decision made once and never revisited.
That is not a failure of intelligence. It is a rational response to a mind that is already full.
But here is the part that took me twenty years to understand. There is very little room in any given week. There is a great deal of room across twenty years. Understanding accumulates the way money does, and the years spent not learning something are the years it is not working for you either.
THE INVESTOR MIND
I began learning investing properly in my forties, later than I would have liked.
What surprised me was not the knowledge itself. It was what the knowledge did to everything around it.
Financial news stopped being noise and started being information. A falling market stopped being frightening and started being a thing I could describe. I stopped waiting to be told what was happening and started being able to see it for myself.
The information was never hidden. It was never urgent either. And things that are never urgent are the easiest things in the world to leave.
THE AHA
For years it looked like one more thing to learn. Another demand on an already full week.
I kept assuming there would be a quieter year. There was not. There never is.
So I stopped waiting for one.
What I had wrong was the size of the thing. I thought investing was a subject you had to sit down and learn, the way you would learn a language. One enormous item that needed an enormous amount of room.
It is not. It is one question, then another, then another.
I did not need a quieter year. I needed a smaller first step.
YOUR MONEY MOMENT
The whole point of this issue is that your head is already full, so I am not going to ask you to clear it.
This week, find out the name of the fund, or funds, your pension is invested in. Just the name. Five minutes.
Next week, find out what is inside it.
The week after, look at what it costs you.
That is how understanding begins. With one small question at a time, at whatever pace your life allows.
Because understanding compounds the same way money does. Each piece makes the next piece easier, until the thing that looked like a mountain becomes something you can read in a glance.
And unlike almost everything else you are carrying, learning this becomes easier with time. Once you understand something, you don’t have to learn it again. It becomes knowledge you carry with you, and the load gets lighter.
That is what makes it different. Plenty on that list only grows. This one shrinks.
Catherine x
Phase First.
Phase First is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All investing involves risk. I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, not a regulated financial adviser. You are responsible for your own financial decisions.