The UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently advocated people take out 30 or 35 year mortgages to make home buying more affordable in the face of higher mortgage rates. But if you follow this advice you’ll probably end up paying a very high price indeed.

With the start of a new year, you can now put the past behind you. You can start again and have a sense of hope and optimism about the future. Here are five ideas that might help you make progress with your money in the year ahead.

There is no silver bullet or magic wand to building wealth, and what works for one person might not work for another. But, I've observed several things that keep some people poor.

If you are thinking of buying a house you might need to change how you work out fair value, to avoid losing a lot of money.

Mortgage rates are rising but will you be ready?

I grew up in the 1970s and remember what a terrible decade it was.

Flared trousers, kipper ties and platform shoes were fashionable. The Sex Pistols blasted into the music world; we only had three TV channels, and Top of the Pops was a must-watch Thursday night ritual for most teenagers.

There is no doubt we are in challenging and uncertain financial times. And humans hate uncertainty. 

You'll be experiencing either money troubles or money worries.

Money troubles are financial problems you have right now. For example, not being able to afford food or pay your rent. On the other hand, money worries are financial problems that might happen at some stage in the future…..

Like the laws of the universe, there are some fundemental principles about money which are the foundation of financial success. Everything becomes clearer once you understand the laws of money.

Here are three laws of money that you need to know…

Beyond enough for life's essentials, it really doesn't matter how much money you earn. Unless you can control your day to day spending, you will find it hard to build and maintain your financial wellbeing.

Most personal finance books, websites and videos do uses the word BUDGET to describe how to control day to day spending.

A story from my teenage years, when I lived with my parents in a pub, illustrates a life lesson on money and happiness.

Money is just a tool. If you have lots of money or you don’t have much at all, it doesn’t define you as a human being. But if you can avoid being in poverty and have the ability to choose how you spend your time, you will be able to live a much more fulfilled, or ‘wealthy’ life.

The formula for wealth creation is simple - you have to have more money coming in than going out. It doesn’t matter if you are earning a 6-figure salary, if your day-to-day consumption matches or outweighs this, you are going to be building the wealth you need create options and flexibility for yourself.

I've been wanting to swap my diesel car for an all-electric one (EV) for some time, but I kept telling myself that it wasn't the right time. 

The excuses all seemed reasonable. EVs are too expensive, there aren't enough charging points at petrol stations, installing a charging point at home would be costly….

Then I remembered a conversation my wife Jane had with me about 25 years ago when we were thinking about starting a family. Back then, I said it wasn't the right time financially. If I could just earn a bit more, build a bit more savings...

When it comes to money and personal finances, I find that most people tend to prefer complexity over simplicity and excitement over routine and predictable ideas and actions.

We give lots of attention to the hot new financial trends such as crypto, NFTs, SPACs. But we often fail to grasp the fundamentals of good money management. Things like controlling spending, increasing savings and lowering the cost of investing and insurance.

Whichever way we look at it, we are in strange and unchartered territory regarding wealth creation and preservation. As the world emerges from the global COVID pandemic, governments continue to spend massive amounts of money to try to get their economies firing on all cylinders. 

Mortgage debt is as cheap as it's ever been, with the Nationwide Building Society offering the cheapest five-year fixed-rate mortgage on record. Price inflation is picking up strength, with the latest UK figures showing an annual rate of 2.4%, well above the Bank of England's target rate of 2%.

A hot market is when prices are increasing and there is lots of demand. seems difficult to buy the house you or looking for. I’ve got five key insights I want to share with you, so hopefully you feel more confident and capable in navigating house-buying in such a climate.

Although there is no direct translation, the Japanese word ikigai means living a happy and fulfilling life. It could also be thought of as what motivates and gives your life purpose.

Ikigai was popularised in the west some years ago when a Venn diagram was created that described how to combine one’s passion and purpose with creating value in the world in order to build financial wealth.

How much money do you need coming in each year to fund life after work? Unfortunately, that's a question that few people ever ask themselves and even fewer answer.

Which? has recently published the results of its latest study [1] of thousands of its retired readers. It found that there are three levels of retirement lifestyle annual spending: Essential, Comfortable and Luxury.

Daniel Mangena is an entrepreneur who appeared on my podcast recently and he made this very important observation about the role of money:

“Money is just a tool that gives us more choice. And it's not even really the money that we should be obsessed with. It's having the ability to create a reality that we want to live in, knowing that most of the time, money is probably going to be the easiest way to do that because there are collective agreements around the idea of money being an easy medium of exchange. So I don't think about the money anymore. I think about the quality of life that I want to live and, invariably, the money to do that shows up, all the opportunities to do that show up.”

The COVID pandemic has shone a light on the fact that many people are financially exposed and vulnerable to money-related shocks. Research by the national debt charity Stepchange has found that the leading causes of people getting into debt in 2020 were: 14% - Lack of control over finances, 15% - Reduced income or benefits, 18% - Unemployment or redundancy, 21% - COVID, injury or health-related.

If health is the biggest cause of people falling into debt then that suggests that state benefits are not adequate.