#About this episode
Understand the complex world of debt, poverty, and mental health with money advisor, Colin Trend.
With over 30 years of experience, Colin shares his insights on designing services for people struggling with finances, the impact of harmful design patterns, and the importance of understanding the user's perspective.
This episode includes real-life stories of the people Colin has helped over the years.
Whether you're a designer, a financial advisor, or someone interested in social justice, this episode offers valuable lessons on making financial services more accessible and supportive for everyone.
#Episode links
#Timestamps
01:34 (1 minute 34 seconds)
Colin's relationship with numbers
Colin shares his unique perspective on numbers, finding them reassuring and precise.
05:02 (5 minutes and 2 seconds)
Working in money and debt advice
Colin talks about his career journey, from his time in banking to becoming a debt advisor. He shares his experiences working with vulnerable people and the challenges they face.
07:21 (7 minutes and 21 seconds)
Social injustices and financial vulnerability
Colin discusses the social injustices and financial vulnerabilities he has encountered. He highlights the impact of regulatory changes.
11:16 (11 minutes and 16 seconds)
Mental health and financial struggles
Laura and Colin explore the connection between mental health and financial struggles. They discuss how mental health issues can worsen financial problems and vice versa.
14:09 (14 minutes and 9 seconds)
Designing accessible financial services
Laura talks about the importance of designing accessible financial services for people with math anxiety and dyscalculia. Colin shares examples of how financial institutions can improve their services.
19:04 (19 minutes and 4 seconds)
Real life stories and challenges
Colin shares real-life stories of people he has helped, illustrating the complexities and challenges they face in managing their finances.
24:10 (24 minutes and 10 seconds)
Innovations in financial services
Colin highlights some positive innovations in the financial services sector, such as Monzo's efforts to make their terms and conditions more accessible.
30:28 (30 minutes and 28 seconds)
Final thoughts and more stories
Advice for addressing the needs of vulnerable people in the financial services sector.
#About Colin Trend
Colin started his working life as a graduate in banking, overseeing teams in debt management operations in the 1990’s. He migrated into a Citizens Advice Bureau, working as a ‘young person’s money adviser’, providing one-to-one advice as well as training sessions in money management. This included school sessions and other community settings alongside an office. During this time he created a game with paper money, exploring the transition from school to adult life. This was later picked up in the ex-offender space where a digital version was produced to assist those rehabilitating into the community.
He has 30 years of experience in the money (debt) advice sector, setting up advice centres from scratch. One of these was established in a deprived community, utilising local people who wanted to assist their own communities and another where he still volunteers once a week is in a faith based setting, Plymouth Focus Advice Centre, which is now associated with Community Money Advice and is an AdviceUK member. The focus in each of these has always been around wider money management, not just debt alleviation, and is often referred to as income maximisation.
His advice experience historically was linked to a Mind centre, which led to an invitation to participate in the Money Advice Liaison Group’s ‘Debt & Mental Health Working Party’ that produced the first ‘Good Practice Awareness Guidelines’ in the financial services arena.
He has co-authored a number of documents working with key individuals seeking to support vulnerable consumers, the most well-read being Vulnerability: a guide for debt collection and Vulnerability, GDPR and disclosure.
He is a co-facilitator of the award winning Vulnerability Academy, set up by UK Finance and the Money Advice Trust and is both a consultant and trainer in the financial services sector, where he works supports the Money Advice Trust’s award winning Training and Consultancy Team.
Follow Colin on Linkedin. Email colin at colin@colintrend.com.
#AI generated transcript
I’ve used AI to transcribe this episode. I’d love to pay a human to transcribe all my episodes but I can only pay for guests and editing currently.
You can sponsor a podcast episode or series. Email me at hello@lauraparker.design.
Laura (00:00:01):
Hello and welcome to the final episode of series one. Thank you so much for listening and supporting the Accessible Numbers podcast, a show about designing services for people with dyscalculia and maths anxiety. I'm your host Laura, and I'm a content designer with Lived experience.
This episode does cover some difficult themes like debt, poverty, mental health, and people in crisis. You can email me at hello@lauraparker.design if you'd like to know more before listening.
Today I'm speaking to money and Debt advisor, Colin Trend. Colin has worked in the money in debt advice sector for 30 years. He's dedicated his career to helping vulnerable people manage their finances.
He's a facilitator of the Vulnerability Academy and has co-authored a document called Vulnerability, a Guide for Debt Collection. I'll leave a link in the episode description.
In the episode we discuss poverty, debt, and mental health. We also cover helpful and harmful design patterns and how to design services for people in debt or struggling with money. Colin also shares stories about the people he's helped people over the years.
For more on how to present numbers clearly visit accessible numbers.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn or Bluesky by searching accessible numbers. I'll be back in the summer with season 2, but for now, here's Colin.
(00:01:31):
Colin, how do numbers make you feel?
Colin (00:01:34):
That's a great question. This may sound really, really weird. Okay, so forgive me. I find numbers really reassuring. I find them unpredictable. I love it that they're precise. Some people say that people think in different ways. I've heard it said that people, some people think in numbers, some people think in words, and some people think in pictures. I'm definitely a numbers guy, so I find myself, for example, when I stay at a hotel, I count the numbers up as I walk up the floors of each of the different floors, and I notice that the bottom floor's normally got more steps on it than the next one. And then they're all basically the same. So clearly there's something downstairs in a building that's much bigger, slightly higher ceilings, and I just have weird things like that. I'll just tell you another quick funny one, shall I?
Laura (00:02:16):
Yes, please. That would be great. Thank you.
Colin (00:02:18):
So Voyager won the space probe that they sent out from NASA in 1977, which apparently I read went past Pluto in 1980. I was alive then, but I don't honestly remember all the details I that age of my life. So it took three years to get to the age of our solar system. Right. So it's been going another what, 45 years since then. Okay. And they tell you what speed it's going at, so that's really interesting. I wonder how far it's actually got because in my numbers brain working overtime you see, which is just normal territory for me. So I'm thinking how close is the closest star then? So something like four point something or other two, three, I think it was four point whatever light years away. Okay. So I'm thinking, okay, so if you carried on, you turned that into light years, how long would it take Voyager one to get to the next, assuming it's going in that direction?
(00:03:07):
Of course, the next star in the whole universe, just thinking about how big the universe is and it's going to take some like 74 and a quarter thousand years before it actually travels one light year. And I find that really quite fascinating. Interesting. And the reason I find numbers really reassuring is because I'll just give you again a quick example, and this would be a really simple example just to try and make the point. So 1x2 is obviously 2, but 2x1 is obviously 2. So when you do mathematics, you can generally do things by more than one way. So I find myself doing it a way that I'm maybe supposed to do it and then just doing it some other funny way just to prove that it's right and I can do it a different way. I mean, that's just the way my mind works.
Laura (00:03:52):
Wow.
Colin (00:03:54):
So from your perspective, it might sound really strange.
Laura (00:03:57):
Not strange. No. I'm actually quite jealous of you and how well you can work with numbers. I actually love space and I love science and I go to museums and I watch documentaries and the whole how far away our stars, and it's really difficult to comprehend and I kind of watch it in this curious, ethereal way, if that makes sense, because I can't picture how big the universe is. So it's a very interesting challenge to set myself to try and think bigger. And I struggle with estimating quantities and estimating time and then I guess that's physics, isn't it, really? In some way the mathematics behind space I find quite fascinating from the standpoint of finding numbers quite hard. But I still enjoy all the content and all the spacey stuff. I find that really interesting.
Now you are a consultant in money advice. Can you describe what that means.
Colin (00:05:02):
Yeah, so it can mean a number of different things. I prefer the term money advice. A lot of people would use the word debt advice. There's a subtle difference between the two, which is why I prefer money advice, but debt advice is something that's regulated.
Some of money advice clearly could be regulated, but a lot of it wouldn't be arguably. So generally speaking, people would tend to think about it as working around budgets and working around debt resolutions. So people who might owe more than they can afford to pay or had a period when they got into arrears but can now afford to pay just because they've got some arrears that built up what debt options, what solutions might be available for them. We would sit down, we'd work through budgets together, we'd look at people's income, making sure they're getting all the right money that they're entitled to.
(00:05:51):
Something like 21 billion pounds worth of unclaimed welfare benefits in society, which is quite staggering when we're in a cost of living crisis and austerity year after year after year. So many people going to food banks, why on earth do we have 21 billion pounds of unclaimed benefits? It's just a nonsense.
So we look at increasing people's income and that can quite typically be a really, really good way of assisting people just to sort of stabilise their financial situation. They find things they weren't entitled to. And then we look at the expenditure, what you're spending your money on, and we'll try to think about how we maximise their expenditure. So that might be through social tariffs as they're referred to. So lots of different social tariffs might exist, so your water company or your energy company might have a special cheaper tariff for people on lower level incomes, but so does your telecommunications company probably. And many people don't know this stuff and they dunno what the eligibility criteria are, and to do that, they've got to produce a budget or they've got to talk about their income and possibly also their expenditure. And so for many people that just becomes rocket science all of a sudden keeping the space thing going.
Laura (00:06:57):
Yeah, I did not know that. I didn't realise that there were sort of discounts available for you if you're on a low income. Interesting. So when you first started out working in a bank, I believe, is that right?
Colin (00:07:10):
I did indeed.
Laura (00:07:11):
Did you have an impression or assumption that everyone would understand how to handle money and they understood numbers well, that kind of thing?
Colin (00:07:21):
Yeah, I mean I think I'd go back even further than banking. So if I was to go back to primary school for sake of argument, and I'll try and put this into modern language, so probably would be year five as we would call it. Now, we used to have a really old teacher and he would sit us down in the class altogether on the carpet and we would do our times tables and he did it in a competition competitive sort of way. So actually if you've got something wrong in a times table, you drop down to the back of the queue, so to speak. Okay. And so the aim of the game effectively was to get to the top of the top of the queue. So he would ask you a times table either a question specific question or to complete an entire times table from obviously one to 10.
(00:08:12):
And then you would complete that and you'd either, if you completed it, you stayed where you were, but then go to someone else and someone else got it wrong, they dropped from wherever they were further down the queue. Okay, wow. So I recognised even at that stage, I was pretty good at numbers. I would pretty much always be top of the queue. When I went to secondary school, I went to a grammar school and I was actually pretty much top of the queue in maths at grammar school as well. Never found numbers a problem. And again, this is just because you asked me, okay, when I did my O level, I'm that old, I was the last year to do O levels before GCSEs came in. I finished my O level maths half an hour early, which is fairly typical for me having checked everything by going through my double thing that I talked about earlier.
(00:08:57):
And that was fairly typical for me. Anything to do with maths, not a problem. I then went into A levels and I had to change school to do A levels, and I went to a different grammar school, which was arguably slightly better than the one I was at. And I suddenly found I was rather mediocre in this a level class. I thought I found that really strange, really funny, but I guess I inferred right back to my primary school days that some people struggled with numbers or struggled with their times tables at least because that's the context. I obviously recognised that I clearly had a bit of a talent and I wouldn't have used that word a gift. And I guess I would probably reflect on that. I'm actually quite fortunate in terms of my ability to process and deal with numbers. When I went to university, just as a completely aside, I went on a programme because poor students had to survive as they do these days.
(00:09:49):
So at university there was this thing that the university offered to students, which was if you take these vitamin pills or you take the placebo, you didn't know which one you were on. This particular American company will then ask everybody the same questions and we want to check your progress over six or nine months or something. It may have been a year, I can't remember. And the reality is you'd go back and maybe every month and you'd do the same sort of tests again and again, again. And what they would do was all about numbers on a screen. They would flash out some different numbers, then you had to repeat back those numbers and it would get longer and longer and longer and longer and longer. So I could easily, without having ever sat down and done this test, do you a 12 digit code without any problem whatsoever.
(00:10:35):
But what I found really fascinating was as I did this longer and longer, I could probably do double that before the time I would fall off at the end of the experiment. And I thought, these vitamins are amazing, who knows whether I was on the real thing or whether I was on a placebo. But it just sort of fitted well with me. And I've always found almost quite exhilarating working with numbers because there's a challenge that comes with it and something because it's precise, as I said earlier, really, because whether you're right or wrong, whereas when you deal with language and when you deal with many other things in life, it's never that precise. And so it's like, is it right, is it wrong? Why isn't it quite right? So you could get really high marks and exams, the other exams you wouldn't and think, well, what did I do wrong? It's funny.
Laura (00:11:16):
It is funny. And a lot of the people that I meet who are anxious around numbers or that they might have maths anxiety, dyscalculia, they tend to work in language or content. So they're journalists, designers, content people. And I wonder whether there's a thing there. A friend of mine has a joke around, she wants to avoid numbers so much that she went into words instead because there are much easier to handle. And I had the opposite experience too at school. I was in the bottom set for maths, science, anything maths related actually. And I was there throughout my whole school period, I wasn't screened for any neurodivergent conditions. And it did feel like the bottom set was very much the mess around class. So I think the teacher really tried to engage us, but obviously my experience was that numbers were just so insurmountable that I would do anything to avoid them.
(00:12:16):
And then we ended up doing colouring in mathematical colouring books and just the poor teacher just tried to come up with ways to engage us in numbers. And I think me personally, it was a real struggle and it's hard to now as an adult, it's hard to get rid of that feeling that you were in the bottom set. I don't have a maths GCSE or anything, and I've tried to get one, I think three times I've tried to reset my maths GCSE and it's, it's not worked. And sometimes even now in my thirties, I kind of get embarrassed to say it. It's not often people ask you, do you have maths GCSEs? But maths does come up in questions, particularly around personal finance and debt and money and banking, which we'll get into as well. How I try to describe my experience is very much a way of avoiding saying I don't have maths GCSE.
(00:13:14):
And then sometimes I just say it and people get it. So I was on the phone to a bank once and I had a really horrible experience and we were going back and forth around my account and how I was constantly getting locked out of the account. I couldn't remember my pin number, the person on the other end of the phone, which very much couldn't understand that because it's a four digit number, how could you forget that number, write it. They were saying things like, write it on your hand, write it on a piece of paper, put it in your purse. And I ended up just saying, look, I didn't have a maths GCSE, I'm really bad at maths. And I kind of felt sorry for the person on the phone because they couldn't Understand my perspective because they felt, I felt like they were themselves very confident with numbers and it was a real barrier to try and explain my experience to that person.
Colin (00:14:09):
And we only see the world through our own eyes. We, that's the problem. And it takes us to be put into an uncomfortable position where suddenly our eyes are opened effectively that suddenly, goodness, I didn't realise the world looked like that. So I guess going to university was a bit like that for me, but more so coming back to the same city where I'd lived before because I suddenly found myself eventually working in the same city which I'd grown up in. My parents were teachers, we lived in the nice area on the outside of the city. I went to grammar school, as I said already, and actually I suddenly found the city was completely different to what I'd understood it to be. And it's not quite shattering in the sense that, forgive me, it didn't really impact my direct life other than I was working in some areas that I never really went to as a child.
(00:14:52):
But I think for other people, it absolutely is. So if we say maths, English, everyone's got to get a GCSE in these before you can even go past go on the monopoly board sort of thing, then clearly that's really disproportionately unhelpful to a huge group of people where these things are effectively alien for me because I know you're really good at art, right? We've just touched on that outside this podcast, but I can't do art to save my life, but it didn't really matter at school. I could just avoid it. But actually you can't avoid maths and you can't avoid English, can you?
Laura (00:15:23):
Exactly. Yeah, good point. We were just talking about your experience and I think you got up to, you were talking about your school experience and then how about work? How did you actually get into consulting on debt advice and money advice?
Colin (00:15:37):
Yeah, that's a really, really good question. So I didn't choose to go into banking, believe it or not. I actually wanted to go and work for a charity abroad in the third sector, and I got to a final interview with an NGO.
Laura (00:15:51):
What's an NGO again?
Colin (00:15:53):
Sorry, non-governmental organisation. They're just generally referred to as NGOs, aren't they? Sorry, I thought it was even to mention the name of the organisation, jargon. We all have it, don't we? And so I was made, I was sorted, and it turned out I had a final interview just as my final exams were taking place in the third year and there were three of us at interview for two places. It's like happy days, there's really good odds here, aren't there? Me? Ended up with the job and I was the one they didn't take.
(00:16:20):
And I was absolutely gutted because I'd done absolutely nothing looking for no other jobs because this is what I was going to do. I was going to go off and do some amazing fun things, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, whatever that was, who knows really. And actually I had to face the fact that I had no job and I was just about to graduate. So I decided to ignore that fact for a moment or two and finish my exams as opposed to being an utter distraction. And then if you don't have a degree, then goodness me, you're not going to have a job anyway type thing. So I had to suddenly turn up at the careers office after my final exam and say, I'm one of those silly students that left it to the last moment and now I need a job, what's available type thing.
(00:16:58):
So when it came down to what was available, there was very little left at that stage. And for me, there was a few things in retail insurance and banking that came up. And I remember when I got my first graduate job and Abbey National for me, a two year graduate thing, it's like, wow, I'm going to sign this and get it back before they change their mind. I was just so excited about it. And of course being in numbers, I mean when I was at school, they said I should go. When I went through that sort of what job should you do later in life, RIS came up. So I didn't know what RIS was at that particular point. But anyway, banking, finance, it's just made for me. So it'll work out well, happy days. But because I was so late in the journey, I've been actually literally had run out of branches.
(00:17:42):
They'd already filled up the branch allocations. There were five of us left at the end that got put in debt collection centres. And I didn't go into banking to work in debt collection. I was just working in teams where you're just chasing people, managing teams, chasing people for outstanding payments. This is way before the FCA came along and started talking about vulnerability, et cetera, et cetera. And it was ruthless, utterly, utterly ruthless. And I just got to a point of I tried to escape to the branch network. I managed to build up some relationships with the branch managers in the area. They were quite happy to welcome me over. I was in a graduate programme after all, it didn't cost 'em a penny, but I got to the end of that swapping over period. And I didn't have enough qualifications. I hadn't built up enough experience and qualifications in time to move over to the branch network.
(00:18:25):
So I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. And I had a friend that I'd known from University Data who was outside university, and he said to me, you'd be really good as a debt advisor, you should think about debt advice. Why don't you go and work for CAB since of ICE bureau? And I'm like, what's a CAB? I've never been to A CAB. And that's how the journey started really, that arguably I made a decision, but if you could look at it horrifically the other way around, I crashed out of banking and had to reinvent myself from start all over again from scratch. And so I just started volunteering at CAB whilst I was unemployed for a little while, quickly went through the ranks there and managed to get a paid post about a year later.
Laura (00:19:04): And how long has it been since that CAB post?
Colin (00:19:09):
Yeah, that was 1995. It's a few years back, isn't it? And I used to be young in those days, you see. So I was a young person's money advice worker working and coordinating with lots of other young people, someone who was much their own age or just slightly older who clearly are supposed to know a few things about money and could help them with their challenges. And most of those young people, some of them would've just been, forgive me, traditional, normal CAB clients, I.E anybody. But actually quite a lot of it was I did some schools work and I did lots of work in different community centres and possibly where people working with where they'd sort of fallen at school, so they were meeting youth workers and all that sort of stuff. So something was pretty interesting and clearly gave me a sense that lives were quite different, which I expected, and clearly numbers was just a part of that, but I didn't even at that stage exclusively think, oh, it's a numbers issue.
(00:19:58):
This is just a disadvantage and many, many factors that have maybe some of these people fallen into these situations. The most spectacular issue I ever came across at the CAB within my first six months was a loan shark situation where somebody owed 50,000 pounds. This is back in the 1990s, right? 30,000 of that was to his parents. So they weren't talking to him, they basically disowned him. So his uncle brought him to the CAB and said, apart from the 30,000, he owes 20,000 pounds to a loan shark, and the interest on that is a thousand pounds a week, let alone paying any capital back on it.
Laura (00:20:34):
Wow.
Colin (00:20:35):
What do we do? Where do we go from here? That was pretty dramatic, but it didn't put me off.
Laura (00:20:43):
What did you do in that situation?
Colin (00:20:46):
I went to, I want to help. That's what I did. Obviously I was quite young and quite new into that stage. And I mean, theoretically you couldn't write a letter, dear Mr. Lone Shark, please accept one pound a month for the next squillion years. That's never going to work, is it? So we had to consider the legal route, which was effectively speaking to authorities about what had happened. We have loan shark experts across the UK now that can help people in this space and prosecute them. It wasn't so coordinated in those days and the person literally came in and wasn't willing to engage with the statutory services, is probably the best way of putting it. They weren't willing to go and take legal advice with a solicitor where they could have got some free advice as well. So literally with their uncle, they just disappeared. And to this day, you wonder one earth ever happened to that person in that situation.
Laura (00:21:38):
That's really sad story. Which leads me on to my next question around some themes of the social injustices that you may have experienced. It sounds like, I'm not going to guess how many years you've been doing it, but since 1995, I think you said, over that time period, are there any outstanding or major themes that you've seen or perhaps changes that you've seen over the years in the work that you do?
Colin (00:22:05):
I mean, we've seen, obviously regulatory stuff has changed immensely. To put that in perspective, whilst I was working at the CAB I got a job at the local council working in their council tax department and managed to find this really niche little post eventually working in their committal team. And a committal team is the team that goes to court every week to take people to a court. It's in the magistrate's court where the magistrates decide whether they're going to commit them to prison or not for nonpayment of council tax. So it was again, a really interesting experience and a set of, I guess knowledge as well as experience of just thinking about lives and situations. And there were opportunities for the debt to be written off, but it wasn't always written off. And sometimes the local author's perspective would be sometimes they're too, they write the debt off too quickly, the magistrates.
(00:22:57):
Then there are other times when they just want to get this person, forgive me, sent to prison because they're a repeat offender and the magistrates won't do it. And the council was incredibly frustrated through that process. So you've got a sense of organisational objectives as much as personal individuals. And obviously I never met the personal individuals and got to know them in any great detail, whereas my CAB experience clearly put me right into the forefront of what people's lives were very much like. But the ruthless debt collection, if you like, arguably there is still councils in the UK that would take people to the committal court to commit them to prison for nonpayment council tax. And yet we've seen an utter transition within the financial services space in particular where we now have the consumer duty. That's just never going to happen. I mean, forgive me, there are still houses that are regulated by the financial conduct authority where someone has a mortgage and it's still repossessed, there will still be repossession. It's not that nobody ever repossess, but they've got to think really carefully and think about the support that goes in place for those people and make sure that everything that's practically possible could have been done in order to support people. And I'm sure there are less repossessions without any doubt because of that compared to what it would've been back in the nineties when I was chasing people through the bank.
Laura (00:24:10):
I was doing some research for this episode and I found, I think there might be a social enterprise or a charity, but they're called Fair 4 all financE.
Colin (00:24:21):
That's it.
Laura (00:24:21):
And I was reading some of their reports and their latest report, I believe found out that nearly half of UK adults, and that's 44% now live in financially vulnerable circumstances. And what's more that they found out that people from minority ethnic groups experienced discrimination and multiple barriers to accessing financial services in the UK. Do those stats kind of chime in with your experience at all?
Colin (00:24:51):
Yeah, I mean, I've got a friend who came over here from Nigeria and he was a lecturer in physics in Nigeria, and he said to completely reinvent himself, so came over and originally started to work in the care sector. He's now works on an NHS apprenticeship type thing. So he's halfway through that has to do exams and qualifications to ultimately get through that. And again, he's really struggled with passing his English GCSE. He's done it, which is why he could get on the apprenticeship. But it took him years and years and years to do that because of again, capability around English not being his first language. So there are clearly additional barriers and challenges for some people and some of that might be environmental. I used to live in Nigeria, now I live in the uk, and although English would've been spoken over there, actually writing English is something completely different.
(00:25:43):
And of course the English language is different from country to country as well. So I guess there are some obvious links that I see through some probably friendships as well as through the casework that I still deliver. But I think there's say some of those environmental and some of those are much more challenging because they fit, I suppose, arguably into what we might call the invisible space and the invisible disabilities things in your mind for sake of vibrant capability issues and neurodiversity, you'll be a part of that. It's very difficult to see these things. And so we know that if you have a guide dog, people are far more likely generally to be much more positive towards you because they can see you have a guide dog and therefore make adjustments. And so we'll see organisations making adjustments. You can bring your guide, no dogs except for guide dogs, right? It's actually a quite small proportion of the population, whereas there are much bigger invisible disabilities where we don't find those adjustments being offered because we don't understand them and we don't see them in front of us in order to make that adjustment, do we?
Laura (00:26:40):
It's interesting you say that because I have a few friends who are guide dog users and they have a real mixed experience out in the world. So some places, yeah, they have the guide dog only poster in the window, but they'll still not accept the dog or they'll ask for additional certification around the dog, even though the dog has its fluorescent lead. So yeah, it's interesting that you think about visible disabilities and people perhaps treating them differently, but that's not always in a good way. It could be a bad way as well. But I'm interested in if you've ever dealt with anybody who's been in debt who has had or has talked about maths anxiety or even dyscalculia at all, has that come up for you?
Colin (00:27:30):
It's really interesting you asked that. And again, I've been thinking about that over the 30 years or so that I've been doing advice work. I've never ever spoken to an individual that's come to me and said, I've got dyscalculia. Okay, interesting. Now I realise that this is actually quite hard to get a diagnosis of dyscalculia, so let's just bear that in mind. But I've seen a lot of people over the years and I think historically I would probably have just seen these people and put them in a bucket of this clearly financial capability issues here of some description rather than possibly, and just in my head, not ever written down maybe a learning either disability, stroke difficulty, depending upon the language that you might wish to use and just try to take those things into account as best I can. I'm not treating as it were the discal anymore than I'm treating someone's depression or anything else.
(00:28:26):
So I don't necessarily need to go too far with this unless maybe I'm seeking something like a write-off from a creditor, in which case I am actually compiling information. Or potentially if I'm doing some welfare of benefit work and we are doing some disability benefits or sickness benefits, then again we talk about those things and we would record those things. They could be taken in consideration and considered by some other third party usually in the DWP in order to take that into consideration and make an appropriate award. But even when I take into consideration my welfare benefit experience, I can't think of anybody who's ever said they had dyscalculia.
Laura (00:29:05):
Yeah, I'm not surprised. I thought someone might have said that they struggle with numbers or something like that, which is typically how I used to describe it before I even learned the words dyscalculia, which was only about three or four years ago now. I think I was in my late twenties when I discovered it. So throughout that time I just thought I was stupid and could do maths on numbers. And it was actually quite accepted from the upbringing that I had. And it was very much like, oh, don't worry, you're never going to be a scientist anyway, so you don't have to worry about being good at numbers. It's really sad, isn't it? But that was the reality of it.
You mentioned there people calling and expressing that they had depression, and I want to touch on this, mental health and money and debt and how they're intertwined. And there's a kind of cycle which happens where if your mental health is low or you're depressed or anxious, it makes earning money or managing money trickier more difficult, and then you're more likely to fall into debt because of that, and then it keeps going round and round as well. Is that accurate, would you say?
Colin (00:30:15):
Yeah, I mean sometimes the mental health comes first and sometimes the debt comes first and whichever bit of the journey you're on, it can then suddenly engage with the next bit. And it's just like you say, it just goes like a water going down a sink, it just disappears and you can't stop it.
Laura (00:30:28):
That's a really good way of describing it. And I felt that way when I was younger. When I was a student, I was a bugger for having payday loans or signing up to payday loans.
(00:30:40):
And I remember avoiding the mail and avoiding calls from numbers I didn't recognise was a kind of thing I would do. They were obviously chasing me for my repayments and they would write to me and they would call me and I would get the letters through and I would just switch off part of my mind and be like, I'm not looking at that. I'm not dealing with that. And same again, if I had a call from a withheld number or unknown number, a number I didn't recognise, I would let the call rings through and then if the number was shown, I would search for that number online and see who was calling. And if it was anyone trying to collect debt from me, I wouldn't call them back. And I think what's happened is I've brought that through to being, I guess I was an adult then, but through my life now I don't have any debt, thankfully I've worked hard to pay that debt off. But any type of bill or statement or call from someone I don't recognise kind of brings this feeling of real anxiousness to my fore brain. And I wonder whether it's from the time where I was avoiding the kind of debt collectors and knowing what I do now about how my own brain works, I wonder whether part of it was my own kind of necessity for needing that money. And part of it was due to the company not explaining things like interest rates properly.
(00:32:08):
I remember not reading a contract just because it was so hard to read.
(00:32:15):
This lengthy document that came through the post. And I remember there was the interest table of how much you would borrow and how much you would be paying back. And I couldn't understand why the numbers were so different. In my mind it was like I'm borrowing a thousand pound, I'm paying back a thousand pound. I didn't understand why it was like I'm paying back £2000. Yeah. So I totally avoided that. And now as I work in design, I'm learning a lot about deceptive design patterns and how companies aren't really doing enough to explain these complex jargon, heavy legalese legal content. So yeah, it's something that the whole debt thing is something I'm absolutely paranoid about now. I almost avoid any kind of finance or any kind of upfront, sorry, paying when I don't have the money already saved. So if I want to buy something, I save it for it and then get it. And it stems from the uncertainty and anxiousness of having debt in the past.
Colin (00:33:20):
That makes sense. And we don't make choices for other clients, but we may find that some clients, it's like anything in life really, isn't it? If you get your fingers burnt, you try not to repeat the same experience because you have an idea that it's probably not going to go well again unless something fundamentally has changed is different. So sometimes through the money advice process. So let me just retrace that slightly. I think there's an assumption in the money advice sector, and I don't mean necessarily coming from debt advisors. I mean coming from the bigger perspective in society where all people need is education, you just need to educate people about interest rates. You just need to educate people about terms and conditions. You just need to educate people about numbers or whatever else. And that is absolutely true for a proportion of people, but actually there's something underneath the water then where people don't need just education.
(00:34:15):
They need some modelling which might help them work that stuff through more effectively. But there's one person I'm working with, the advice centre at the moment, I can think of who I've seen probably for about 20 years, goes back a long, I don't see her all the time. She's got mental health issues. I would've 20 years ago, put her in that sort of probably learning difficulty stroke disability space since, which wasn't an aspect around of interest to me in the terms of money advice had diabetes, but that's now affected her sight. So she's now registered blind, okay? So over the years there's deterioration. She expresses sometimes aspects around suicide. So when she came to see me within the last three months and came with a support worker, she was talking about suicide even in that first interview, having not seen it for quite some time.
(00:35:11):
And she will always come back to me as a trusted person I suppose whenever she has a financial problem. And some people would, I would arguably say, would say, well, that's something called dependency where she has to come back to you and there's something much deeper going on here with this lady where it's not about education. There's fundamentally she doesn't have the skills or the abilities to manage certain things. You can manage one thing or maybe another thing, but as soon as the things start to get complex, something that I could juggle quite easily, and actually many of our other clients can juggle. They just need maybe some breathing space for a period of time to get back on track or they're going to sell their property or something else they can do. But this lady, she's indicative of many other people where there's something fundamentally far different.
(00:36:03):
Now, I've never asked if she's got dyscalculia. As I said before, we don't really go into the reasons to why. But equally, if you don't understand some of the why, you are never going to actually address some of the issues that the person's struggling with either are you? So whilst we don't want to ask the question why we do want to get to the bottom of what's going on. And so she will tend to mask her problems. Some really, really good example. She's actually really quite chatty. And I think one of the reasons she's quite chatty, and I can only infer this from the experience I've had with her is because she will try to talk away out of a financial problem. And so if she can, I dunno, talk to a debt collector and say, I'll pay you the money, la, la, la, la, la and keep on going, eventually they'll sort of give up and say, you just pay me the money type thing.
(00:36:48):
Yeah, yeah, that's fine. But with me, there'll be gaps in what she says to me that fundamentally don't square up very well to what I would expect a business to do. Or she'll say they did this to her when actually businesses don't do that to people. And so she makes up some of the stuff she doesn't know with her own stories effectively. So she'll join things together that in her mind, I think they wholly make sense in her own mind, but they don't make sense in the bigger picture of how money advice actually works. So I actually have to listen to lots of this stuff and then start to deconstruct some of those things to actually work out where is the problem, where did this thing start going wrong? So at the moment, it's been an energy company, she owes 4,000 pounds worth of arrears to them.
(00:37:31):
She's only been in this property for a couple of years. And so she would say to me, I've been paying on a payment card, I've been paying on a payment card, and they're obviously overcharging me and I've got some smart metres that have been put in, I don't understand smart metre. So there's lots and lots of complex things taking place and I've got to work out what, okay, so let's start with the smart metre. So I get the support worker, for example, take some pictures of the smart metres and then we'll talk to the energy company. Are these the right smart metres? Do you have these readings? So we can establish whether in fact they are working correctly and actually we are on the same page in terms of what we think is owed against what actually is owed. And then we have to think about a payment card that doesn't go straight to this utility company, it goes to a third party service where those payments gone and actually was she paying a payment card on a previous property as opposed to this property?
(00:38:19):
So you're trying to unpack all of these complex things and work out where the problem is. But again, because numbers are very precise, ultimately I can find out what the problem is usually and therefore work my way back to how we're going to resolve those things. But in this particular case as say your string things together, that altogether don't make any sense if you have a better understanding as to what energy companies do or don't do, how money advice works, how a payment card works. And so one of the simple things we tried to get to do quite early on was because clearly the payment card wasn't working, she agreed to make some payments, but of course she didn't know how much she had to pay because she doesn't know how much she's using. So we just agreed, look, it'll be a hundred pound a month, let's just start at a hundred pound a month.
(00:39:02):
And so she agreed to do this but then didn't do it for a number of other months. And so with a support worker who goes around there every week, it's a third party service that's paid for because of her disabilities, they would then try to do some of these things step by step by step and then feed me back, here's the latest bill, here's a picture of this, here's a picture of that. And then we would try to just work it for step by step. Now that I can talk to her, I can ring her up, she, she'll ring me up, we can have a conversation with each other absolutely fine in terms of doing that. But when it comes to the numbers in the nicest public percent, it's utterly clueless as to what is really going on. And so for the challenge for me is trying to just set her up on some basic payments in a consistent way.
(00:39:44):
So in my head, Laura, it'll be like, I'm going to set up a direct debit, but the trouble with the direct debit for her, she doesn't have the money. It's going to be in the account at that particular point in time. So it's not about my answers. So we have to try to get into the head of the other person, so how do you actually pay other things? What would work for you in this particular situation? And so we do see some financial inclusion type training that's offered by some charities. There's one for example, where they say, get rid of all your direct debits, get rid of all your signing orders, just operate in cash. Well, that might work really well for some people, but for other people, if I wish to try and scrapple my direct debits and standing orders, I'd be in a right mess.
(00:40:22):
Not just because I'd have to carry a lot of cash around all sorts of different places, but the reality is it would be scrambling things yet for other people to tangibly have that money in their hands would make it a lot easier. But it's not for me to say to them, to come on this course and do financial care, you must cancel your direct debits and standing orders and just do everything in cash. I've got to find out what works for you. So we've something what doesn't work, and actually making sure we don't follow those particular routes as much as what does work. And so to cut a long story short, she actually still wants to pay on a payment card, even though it's failed and the payments have seemingly got lost and she can't find the receipts to prove she'd made those payments. She would rather still go back on a payment card.
(00:41:02):
So she made a payment on the payment card. Of course the payment card goes through a third party organisation, it doesn't go straight onto her account. So within a week, the energy company were on the phone to her saying, you haven't made any payments yet. When are you going to make a payment? And she's like, I paid you last week. I dunno why you haven't got the money. So she's then ringing me up in distress as to where this money's gone. Bear in mind, she thinks they've lost thousands of pounds of money already. So you can see how it can just exacerbate itself on the back of a small problem. And to her, it's very predictable. It's going to go wrong. There's the evidence, see, it's all gone wrong. And so the natural position is, I'm not going to pay you any more money until this money turns up. And of course then it just keeps on growing and growing and growing. So there's all sorts of things to unpack it, but you've got to find the right connectors and the right levers to pull as it were with that person first.
Laura (00:41:47):
Well, a very clear and complex example of how somebody could have multiple access needs, multiple disabilities, may also be struggling with numbers in some way, who's trying to access help but can't get the help they require or is in need of your help for a constant basis. It sounds like you've been dealing with this person for how many years did you say?
Colin (00:42:10):
Probably about 20 years.
Laura (00:42:11):
20 years.
Colin (00:42:11):
Yeah. And she stuck with me through different organisations just because she trusts me to help her with those things. She doesn't forgive me, doesn't always necessarily the answer.
(00:42:21):
She's going to have to do some things that she wouldn't necessarily choose to do, but she trusts me that that must ultimately be the best options for her. I mean, she can obviously still make decisions about the ones that presented, but she's taking those decisions and she knows that she has to pay her energy ultimately. There's not a question, not a query about any of that stuff. But actually she knows that I'll step in and I will write letters and I'll get on the phone and I will do things. And if a support worker doesn't do something, I'll talk to support worker. Whereas she feels everybody else just says, go and do this. Either read this leaflet, go and do it yourself or go and find it online or whatever else it happens to be. Go and self-serve. It's just a really good example that that's amazing for many people, but for people who can't do those things any more than someone who's got mass anxiety, it's just mission impossible.
Laura (00:43:07):
Absolutely. And I think it's very clear from that example just how many extra steps this person has gone through to do something as simple as paying energy. Like you said, if she went down the self-serve route, she could probably log in via a website, pay her energy that way. Instead. I was trying to keep count of how many different stage gates there are in her journey. So she's contacting you, she's using a third party payment card to try,
Colin (00:43:36):
She's at the post office,
Laura (00:43:37):
Post office
Colin (00:43:38):
Transport to get to the post office because she doesn't have any accessibility herself.
Laura (00:43:42):
Exactly.
Colin (00:43:43):
And then the support workers, but it isn't just the support workers, there's multiple support workers for various reasons because stretched and people go sick and they have holidays, so she's changing. And so the story has to be passed on from one to another. So they're having to keep very good notes of what I'm producing and sending to her. And that's just the energy bill for goodness sake, let alone the rent arrears and other things that she's almost paid off now.
Laura (00:44:05):
So as a designer who helps to design services, this example is something we need to think of because we commonly assume that people are using a service and there's nothing else going on in their lives. And they woke up that day and they decided to call or email, text, get help for something they're trying to do, and there's no other thing, there's nothing else happening. And they're absolutely fine and they feel great in actuality, you know how daily life is and things go wrong all the time. And you might be stressed, anxious, you might be grieving for a loved one, and you're trying to sort out their finances perhaps. And so as designers, I think we could take a step review how someone who's trying to access debt advice or debt help might be thinking at that point in time. And that's why user research is so vital in this space, actually talking to real people who are trying to access these services and exploring what their life is like so that we're not making the assumption that somebody's accessing help feeling great and there's nothing else going on.
Colin (00:45:18):
Absolutely.
Laura (00:45:19):
I had a chat with some of the adults from the Dyscalculia advisory board about some of the ways that we struggle when it comes to money management, debt management, and some of the topics that came up were things like understanding interest rates for loans and mortgages. I think we've talked about that. There's also things like budgeting and knowing how to split up a budget and how much to save for your different budgets. If you're using an online bank or a banking app, you usually have spaces or pots where you can put money each month, which is great, but it's like knowing how much to save for what is a kind of a problem. There's also the idea of borrowing money over time. So a mortgage or a car payment or something like that where you're paying monthly and you're paying that amount for a long time. So sometimes I get into the habit of just thinking, oh, it's 200 pound a month, it's not, it's 5,000 over how many months At 200 pound a month, I kind of forget that it's broken down into months and that there's usually an interest or an add-on to that monthly payment. And other things that came up were understanding credit scores and how that relates to finance.
Laura (00:46:41):
How missing a payment could negatively affect your credit score. And I think there's a lot to do with credit scores and how long they take to go back to normal. And there's a lot of hidden content in credit scores I feel. And other things like not having maths GCSE to not being able to do basic budgeting for yourself, making sure that when you get paid, you've budgeted enough for your food for that month. So it's like taking into account how much you're actually spending on food, which would mean adding it all together, which is not great if you're really bad at estimating. And I guess you could save your receipts and add up your receipts, but then again, there's an equation involved in that. Yeah, so lots of interesting things came up. And something else which you might not deal with is trying to work with HMRC or do a self-assessment or any type of tax, even council tax. So council tax, it's weird because the year isn't like January to December. I remember getting council tax bills and being really confused. I think they do it over 10 months, is that right? And it doesn't follow a normal convention, so it's very confusing. Yeah.
Colin (00:47:59):
So again, many people don't necessarily know, we're just picking up on that last point precisely. So accounts tax would generally bill people over 10 months, but you now have the statutory right to ask to pay over 12 months. So for some people helping with budgeting, that's pretty decent, pretty helpful. I
Laura (00:48:15):
Didn't know that. Okay.
Colin (00:48:17):
Yeah, I mean it changed quite a few years ago, but that was put in place to help people with budgeting. In reality, if you are probably a tiny bit better, well off, it's actually quite nice to pay over 10 months and then have two other months, maybe a month, where you squeeze the MOT and for the car will just be one way of doing the cash flow. So if people know they can make choices, but if you don't know, you just end up on this sort of way of doing things. So the water bill will be exactly the same potentially. So you end up with 10 months of the year where you've got some higher costs and possibly two months when you've got some cash. But of course it's just after Christmas when you could have done it with it probably just before Christmas. I mean, there's some really interesting changes that have taken place over the years.
(00:49:00):
So lots of social landlords, for example, will have two rents free over the Christmas period where you can understand why that happened because people probably, I dunno the full details here, but you arguably probably what happened was people didn't pay their rent very well over that period. So actually it just makes sense to take those two weeks out and give people a bit of an easier journey along the way, isn't it? So there's some things that are done within the sector or by an individual organisation, but the trouble is that you dunno what you don't know, which is where the money advice sector fits in and hopefully find some of those things. And some of those things, they are the same and have been the same for a long, long time. And then there's other stuff that will come in that will change those things, which we have to keep up to date with.
(00:49:42):
But also, I'll give you another quick example. So I'm dealing with somebody else who's relatively young, single has schizophrenia and personality disorder, and he came in to see me face to face the first time, and his mum was on a telephone, she doesn't live locally. So we had a three-way with her. And because of that, we all agreed that it'd be good to have a signed up as a longer term support just in case he was unwell, which indeed he is at the moment. So I'm only going through his mum at the moment, which just loops back to what we were talking about earlier, really, which reminded me that I think when you work in a very, very, very small organisation, advice centres are generally quite small. Most advice centres would think we need the support and help of other people. So we would always be looking out for other third parties and trying to connect with either the moms and dads and brothers and sisters and as much as organisations because in the nicest possible sense, I can do this thing called money quite well with you.
(00:50:43):
But because of all these other complex needs, you have lots of other needs and supports. Where are those things? And of course, under austerity, the last 10 plus years, lots of those things, the wheels have fallen off, they just don't exist for people. And so they had something in place and suddenly the whole lot's just fallen away. But they dunno where to turn to and they dunno where to go. They'd get a letter one day saying for argument, the council aren't going to pay for this particular service anymore. It doesn't exist, so you can't go there on a Wednesday or you don't get any financial benefit anymore to help with those needs and therefore people just sit in their home because they just dunno what to do about it. And so then the problem builds up over many, many more years and becomes a much bigger thing like the 4,000 pounds of energy debts that we suddenly came across with this other lady.
(00:51:26):
That's a fairly typical response that we as well. So some people might infer, well that's people just sticking their head in the sand. I would say it's not really people sticking their head in the sand, they just frankly dunno where to turn to and who to go to and how to access most of that stuff anyway, even if they did. So there's immense challenges that are taking place in this place for people. But yeah, so I hope that's helpful. I just to say one positive thing in this space, I think there are a few things we can say, but one of the things I do is in my wider role with UK Finance, which is the trade body for most of the prime regulated sector, banking, credit cards, that sort of stuff, and the Money Advice Trust, which is an umbrella organisation which runs National Debt Line Business Debt line, which is mainly self-help and they do amazing fact sheets.
(00:52:16):
So again, if you just want knowledge, they're brilliant with them. I'm a co-facilitator of the Vulnerability Academy, so we tend to run possibly two of these a year if we can, and people will sort of sign up. These are sort of middle to high level individuals in financial institutions that are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. So we've got a cohort running at the moment. We've got something 18 people on the cohort, and that's probably from about 14 different organisations. And so we would then expose them to hopefully some of the best practises taking place. So one of the things that came through from that, which I wouldn't have known, and I'm a monry advisor, remember if I hadn't been involved in the academy, is that Monzo, for example, they have just come back to your terms and conditions that you were talking about earlier.
(00:53:03):
They have rewritten their terms and conditions in a format that is readable for someone of about an 11-year-old level and they also have them in an audio format. So if you find it difficult, challenging reading the words, well, you can listen to it and you can download it if you wanted to and then you could listen to it again and again and again. But actually just the adjustments that can be made are really, really interesting. So historically what would happen is firms would've hidden behind, oh, in the regulation it says you've got to use this term or these words or say these things explicitly. Well, we're not quite so sure anymore when we challenge these things that it actually does say you have to say some of those things. I mean, there are some things that you are supposed to say, don't get me wrong.
(00:53:50):
But the trouble is that many of the organisations have been run by their risk and policy sections in a very heavy way, if you like. These people might be highly qualified, they might be solicitors and lawyers and all the rest of it. Forgive me, whoever argues with a solicitor, a lawyer. But the reality is this has driven a firm centred approach to many of these issues and that's why the FCA has come along and decided that the consumer duty has to be the way forward where we literally put our feet in the customer's shoes, which has practically very, very difficult. How do I do that as a money advisor with someone who has dyscalculia? When I really don't have those challenges myself, I've got to certainly really listen well, but actually genuinely put myself in their shoes is frankly impossible. I've got to go to a different country, the sake of argument where I don't speak the language and then suddenly try to work this stuff out for myself to be anywhere close to trying to get into the same shoes as somebody else.
(00:54:44):
That's about as close as I can get to it. But the reality is there's some really, really good innovation taking place. And the good thing about that is it's then a challenge to other firms because if Monzo can do it, why can't other organisations do it? And so other people are lifting themselves up with the consumer duty behind it saying, this is something we need to think about. This is something we need to look at. And coming back to your lived experience, how do we improve product design? There are organisations where instead of coming to people like me where I've got learned experience, which is actually quite invaluable as well, actually, we can go to people with lived experience and we can say, well, what do you think about this document? So if I worked at Abbey National where I did before and we produced A PDF and we sent it around the office, in fact we did better than that, we sent around many offices and we said, give me some feedback on this particular document that we've set out the interest rate, we've set out the calculations.
(00:55:31):
Does it make sense to you? Well, of course the reality is, of course it makes sense. We've all got a level maths or whatever else. We get numbers. We do numbers every day and we're completely biassed to the fact that numbers is simple stuff. And so we don't recognise the challenges that come with this stuff. So actually you've got to put it in front of other people who don't work in that sector, never worked in that sector, find this stuff challenging and then ask them. And so there's some really, really good principles. We've been working with another firm on the Vulnerability Academy and they've come back to us and they say, well, look, there's four real things you should be thinking about and this is what they're trying to do. And you'll see some of this stuff on their website as well. You need to tell a story.
(00:56:10):
So actually people remember stories. They don't remember paragraphs of text any more than they remember lots of different numbers necessarily, but they will remember a story. So tell a story through what you're trying to explain through the account or through the thing that you want to tell people about. You need to personalise it. Okay? Make it relatable to the individual. So there might be some things that the individual might need to tick or say, yes, that's my situation, or put some things in and then maybe AI can help with some of this stuff. Actually, instead of giving this generic story, let's put in another story here which is much more familiar to you. It draws the person in and makes it relatable, which makes it more engaging and takes out the rubbish that I don't need to know about. And also keeping numbers simple. So how we present numbers and without the point at the end of it, et cetera, et just some really simple stuff in there.
(00:57:01):
And also filling in the gaps. So what do we know about this customer already? I think about this again, at the advice centre we do this. So I've got a letter of authority that I need people to sign so I can send it to a firm. So I establish quite quickly which of my clients find that really difficult. So every year, do I send 'em in the post a blank new letter of authority? No, I don't because I know they really struggle with it. So I actually fill out most of it and then I just leave a little thing at the bottom saying, please sign there type thing and then send it back in. This SAE. Okay, we can all make little differences, but little differences go a huge way to helping people overcome some of these barriers, don't they?
Laura (00:57:39):
Yes, absolutely. I loved the kind of tips you put forward there and you mentioned Monzo, and they are a great case study in trying to make financial information accessible or more accessible I should say. It's funny because I worked for them briefly last year I think it was, and when you're onboarded, they do an awful lot to train everybody no matter what department you're joining in. Accessibility, inclusivity, plain language communication. So well done, Monzo. That was terrific to see.
Was there anything that we didn't quite cover today that you'd like to mention?
Colin (00:58:20):
A few stories have been going through my head while we've been talking and talking about the challenges that people might have in terms of dealing with financial matters. It doesn't necessarily explicitly speaking to Dyscalculia, but it does speak into maths anxiety more generally. I'll tell you two stories, and they're both the same story, but they're just two different people and they just come out in very different but similar ways.
So once upon a time, I was working in a different money advice organisation and we did pretty much all of our advice work was in people's homes, and that's because we worked in a particular area of the city and we recognised that people didn't come to an office. Lots of people just didn't come to an office. Sometimes they didn't come there, they couldn't afford it. Sometimes they didn't come there because it was a bit of a city they didn't know about and just wouldn't go to it anyway.
(00:59:16):
But people were quite happy to see you in their homes, so we had to do some sensible risk analysis and assessments and stuff like that around it. Anyway, one day I go off to this house in a moderately deprived area, not the worst, but moderately deprived area, and I see this lady and we're talking about all her paperwork and she says, I've got tonnes and tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of paperwork. She said, let me show it to you. And then she says, it's upstairs. It's upstairs in the bedroom. I've hidden it away in a cupboard upstairs. And she said, come up and have a look at I'm not coming out your bedroom. Sorry. That definitely isn't what I'm doing. Anyway, she drags out this suitcase, which is not the biggest suitcase you'll ever take on holiday. She can just about move the thing, unzips it at the top of the stairs, and it's just absolutely loaded with letters talking about hiding away and not dealing with things as you were earlier.
(01:00:07):
It surprises me. So at CAB, we regularly see people come in with bags and bags and bags. I've got a client I'm working with at the moment, the advice centre. I've been seeing him on and off for about two years. Most of it's been more often than on. He's got cancer, lung cancer, he's having radiotherapy at the moment. He's not that old. It's a graduate, had a graduate career. Life is really, really different for him now. He's actually really astute with numbers and understands legal things, has fairly substantial mental health issues, so won't throw anything away. So he comes in to see me, he comes in the first time he comes in to see me, he's carrying as many bags as you can imagine in his hands, and he's got a ruck sack on his back. And in this ruck sack, we have to unpack it and take out all of these letters and things.
(01:00:57):
And so we've got the whole floor and the advice centre covered in different piles of letters from different companies, and it takes me more than an hour just to work out what have I got here and then what don't I need? And then for a while we stored some of that paperwork for him so we just didn't have to take it back with him before he would actually let me shred it. But eventually we get to a point where we can shred this stuff because actually we know that's the same as these other seven pages over here. We only need one of them. We don't need all of them, and we can sort of start again. I've still got a really thick file for him, but it's nothing like what he brought in. And even after we'd unpacked all of that, he said, well, there's a lot more paperwork at my mom's and dad's as well.
(01:01:37):
And it's just like, I dunno that I need to see it, but you probably do need to work your way through it. And if you can't bring it in and we'll have a look at it together. But most money advisors don't have the time and the space to do those things. So it's working out who else who can support, who are the people, and if we can't do it, who can? So yeah, so that's just really, again, explaining some of the complexities and challenges and actually how people will just sit on this. And it only becomes a problem when an emergency crops up. So when they've got someone knocking on their door, and that's typically a bailiff about council tax or it's a parking fine bailiff where they're threatening to do far more dramatic things. But of course if you've got nothing, there's probably nothing they can take. So even that isn't such a big threat after all.
Laura (01:02:19):
Yeah, I totally relate to the hoarding of financial information. So when I worked a part-time job through school and college and university, I used to save up all the payslips and I never opened them. I've said this a few times on this podcast, but I would just guess that they would be fine, but I would keep them, keep them unopened in a folder just in case. And I felt like I had to have them and I carried them with me. So I started working at 16, carried them with me up until about three or four years ago. There was something about it that I couldn't get rid of them, and I was always afraid that someone was going to contact me from years ago and go, we paid you too much and you now owe us some money back. So I can totally relate to that anxiety around feeling like you need to keep the financial information safe because somebody's going to come for you to money.
(01:03:14):
And maybe that's a product of being in debt in the past where someone was coming to me for the money and then I kind of carried that through into the future. I guess It is fascinating. I've really enjoyed listening to these real life stories and it's very interesting to get a perspective from somebody who is dealing with these people, I guess on the frontline and helping them.
And I'm just thinking about all of the design aspects. So there's service design, user research, user experience design, and how this kind of, it's very difficult for us to do user research with these people. For one, we can't contact them easily, and two, they're unlikely to want to share this information with a group of strangers and talk about their problems and their situation. So chats like this are very helpful. It's almost like a secondhand user research session where we get to hear from someone like you who does actually speak to people every day who are likely to use, for example, government services. So I currently work in UK government and these people are probably likely to come across a government service. So it's really vital that we get to hear these stories. So thanks so much.
Colin (01:04:34):
Well, lemme just tell you if you've got time, just a couple more stories. So in the advice centre where I work now, which is a very small community based advice centre, we've had someone at university, at Cambridge University come into our advice centre, trained up as an advisor to deliver advice. So he was useful to us, but also to do a research project on the back of that so he could then follow through and ask them more about some of the other stories and constraints and things. So he's written a report, so we do try to open our doors as much as that's practically possible. We've also had two other large financial services firms do two different things with us over the years. So one of them asked us for access to some of our clients so they could talk to them about their relationship with debt collection agencies, and some of them might have had a relationship with that firm and some of them didn't.
(01:05:23):
So it wasn't done directly by that firm. It was done to a third party. So we set up, because we've got such possibly good relationships, we have long-term relationships with some of our clients and many of them are happy to talk and speak to people because they trust us. If we say this is quite helpful and they want to engage with, it's quite helpful for them. So we've had one firm do that. We've had another firm that have produced some videos on the back of our clients. Their original intention was to come in and talk to our clients, but that was a little bit challenging. They were just going to bring a big telly crew down
(01:05:55):
And all that sort of stuff. So we all decided actually that probably wasn't the best way of doing it. So I actually wrote some personas based on our clients, and then they produced six different videos, which then they've used in one of the big banks in the uk, which they used as part of their training portfolio for all of their staff in order to try and help them understand some of these challenges, what it's really like and therefore what the bank should be doing to support these customers as well. So there is lots of creative and innovative ways to explore. Maybe we could take that further forward in some other way or not. So I've just mentioned just in case that's have helped you as well.
Laura (01:06:27):
Absolutely. You mentioned there like a TV crew coming down. I imagine that was just super scary. And part of our role in user experience design is to really think about the experience of the user, and that translates to user research as well. So we do not want to put anyone in a position where they feel like they're in a circus or people are just coming to film them. We would always want to make that relationship a private experience and a comfortable safe one as well. Finally, then, how can people find out about more about you and the services that you offer?
Colin (01:07:08):
Yeah, so I met just one person and the advice centre is quite small and I do lots of work around the country, so don't send them to my advice centre. We only work locally in Plymouth, so now we don't want to see everybody. We obviously couldn't see everybody, but no, I'm happy to talk and share and continue these discussions in a wider format. So I've got a LinkedIn profile I think you could share. People could also contact me through my email address, which I'm sure you'll be happy to share as well. So why not continue the conversation? It's good for everybody, isn't it?
Laura (01:07:41):
If you think you might have Dyscalculia or maybe you've been recently diagnosed, you can find help and advice for children and adults on the Dyscalculia Network, search dyscalculia network, or visit dyscalculia network.com if you want to work with me and make the numbers in your service accessible. Visit lauraparker.design. Big thanks to Steve Folland for editing and producing this podcast.