As a money journalist, I would like to think I am pretty financially savvy when it comes to the ever-changing world of economics.
But I never want to stop learning and am always keen to accrue fresh knowledge and skills, particularly from those with expertise and lived experience of what truly works.
Over the last few years, instead of merely viewing pensions as a payment which come out of my salary automatically, I developed an almost insatiable desire to learn everything about my retirement pots past and present – including where the money is being invested and how much I am predicted to have in retirement.
It was during this time that I kept hearing people mention Rebel Finance School, urging others to learn from the free 10-week online finance course run by husband-and-wife team Alan and Katie Donegan.
After reading an interview with the pair by one of my colleagues, I knew I desperately needed to do this course and see what all the fuss was about for myself.
Alan and Katie Donegan are a UK couple who retired at the ages of 40 and 35, despite not coming from money themselves and starting their investment journey with basic financial knowledge – making plenty of mistakes along the way.
But after discovering the benefits of low-cost global index funds – which allow investors to track world markets – the pair embarked on a passive investment strategy which saw them become ISA millionaires in their pursuit of financial freedom.
Their combined fortune now stands at over £2m and they no longer work and live a nomadic lifestyle travelling the world and staying in hotels and Airbnbs.
Not content with simply enjoying their own early retirement, Alan and Katie wanted a purpose and decided to share their financial wisdom by launching a free online course. Rebel Finance School is a free online personal finance course, advertised as helping people take control of their money, get out of debt and invest for financial independence.
Cynics may say: “But no one does anything for nothing, there must be something in it for them.”
However, they say running the course actually costs them around £12,000 of their own money, they do not make any profit, and they have simply chosen to do this to help others.
What I learnt during the course
When I first told my husband we were going to spend our evenings watching a 10-week online finance course, he didn’t look particularly enthusiastic, probably because it sounded like it had the potential to be tedious and boring.
However, like me, as soon as we began doing the course, he became gripped as it explained even things we thought we knew about in a refreshingly easy to understand way and made us view our finances differently.
While you can watch the course sessions and bonus episodes live week-by-week when they run them annually on their YouTube channel, there are full replays available for most of the year so you can watch them at your own pace, dipping in and out like we did.
It is often aligned with the Fire movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early) but Rebel Finance School is more about taking control of your finances and concentrating on what is important to you.
With episodes looking at everything from increasing your money gap between spending and income, attacking debts, spending on what matters and realising it’s never too late to start tackling your finances, to learning about investing in “boring” index funds which create millionaires, and doing volatility training, there’s a lot of material.
We were taught their strategy – to invest in a fund which covers lots of companies and then leave it to grow.
One of the core mantras, “We don’t invest until we retire, we invest until we expire” is based on the “invest like a dead person” philosophy.
This is based on a famous study by Fidelity which suggested that the best-performing accounts belonged to clients who had either passed away or had forgotten they had an account, because they did not panic-sell during market downturns.
The course also explains the power of compounding in the best way I have ever come across. “Compounding is growth on growth. Your money makes babies, then those money babies make more money babies – and before you know it, BOOM, you’re rich.”
Yes, some of the episodes labour some of the same points repeatedly, but that’s only to hammer facts home and drum them into you.
And yes, during the earlier episodes of examining your finances, looking at barriers and learning about emergency funds, you are desperate to race on to week six onwards, where the “sexy stuff” of investing comes in, but I would urge people to stick at it, as even if you think you know it all, you will be surprised at the nuggets of information which will stay with you.
For me, the heart of Rebel Finance School’s success (and the reason they were awarded a British Empire Medal for services to financial education), lies with Alan and Katie themselves.
They both come across as genuinely nice and real people who are immensely likeable and have faced their own demons and insecurities along the way. They certainly don’t profess to be perfect and they share their lessons and mistakes to urge others to avoid them.
And they don’t dictate what people should do as they recognise everyone is different. They themselves chose not to have children, sold their house and possessions and now spend their time travelling the world – but they are not advocating that everyone should do this.
By the end of the course, we felt strangely bereft at losing our new buddies being beamed into our living room.
Programmes like Rebel Finance School should definitely be on the school curriculum. Heck, it should probably be on the NHS as it’s the financial medicine we all need.
I learnt more during this course than I ever did studying GCSE Maths – and it’s a hell of a lot more useful too. Why was I not taught the reality of compounding, or about investing in stocks and shares and global index funds instead of about Pythagoras’ theorem or using Pi to work out the circumference of a circle? I can honestly say learning those has never helped me out in real life.
When the next live Rebel Finance School 10-week course starts from June 1, we will be watching avidly and despite their groans, I’ve told our children I’ll be making them watch the episodes with us too.
Like virtually everyone who watches this course, the biggest emotion I felt at the end of it was: “I wish I’d discovered something like this years earlier,” – so I want my children to benefit from this essential learning now.