Start here
A few years ago, a colleague called Peter was made redundant. He was completely fine about it – not pretending, actually fine – because his mortgage was manageable, his pension was sorted, and he had savings behind him.
I realised that if it had been me losing that job, I would have been falling apart. Not because I had less. Because I had never really looked at any of it. I was winging it and hoping for the best, which is a perfectly common strategy and also, as it turns out, not much of a strategy at all.
This site is my attempt to change that, for me, and for anyone who recognises themselves in that description. If you have a pension you have never properly checked, a mortgage you do not fully understand, or a vague sense that you should probably be doing more with your money but are not sure where to begin, you are in the right place.
Who this site is for
Be More Peter is for people who are financially functional but financially unconfident. People who pay their bills, have some savings, contribute to a pension, but could not tell you off the top of their head what their LTV is, what their pension is projected to be worth at retirement, or exactly how much of their salary disappears before it reaches their bank account.
It is not for people who already have this sorted. It is for people who are in the process of getting it sorted, or who have been meaning to get it sorted for a while and have not quite got around to it yet. That is a very large group of people, and there is no judgment here – I was firmly in it myself.
Where to go first
If you want to run some numbers – work out a mortgage payment, see what your pension might be worth, find out how much stamp duty you would pay – go to the calculators hub. There are sixteen free calculators covering mortgages, savings, pensions, tax and property. No sign-up required.
If you want to understand how something works before you start playing with numbers, start with the blog. There are plain-English posts on mortgages, pensions, savings, property and the maths behind all of it. A good place to start is the origin story – the full version of the Peter meeting and what it set in motion.
If you are not sure what to focus on first, here is a simple starting point. Pick one thing from the list below – just one – and do it today.
- Log in to your pension and find out what it is currently worth.
- Use the mortgage repayment calculator to see what a monthly payment would look like on a property you have been thinking about.
- Check what your take-home pay actually is after tax and National Insurance; you might be surprised.
- Read the post about LTV if you are planning to buy a home in the next few years, and the term feels fuzzy.
- Open an ISA if you have savings sitting in a current account doing very little.
A note on what this site is not
Be More Peter is information and education, not financial advice. The calculators give you indicative numbers. The blog posts explain how things work. None of it is a substitute for speaking to a qualified financial adviser about your specific situation – and I always say so clearly.
I am a writer, not a financial professional. Everything on here is stuff I have looked up, worked through, or had to have explained to me more than once before it clicked. I am passing it on in the hope that it saves you some of the time I spent nodding along to things I did not fully understand.
However you found this site – welcome. The gap between where you are now and where Peter was is smaller than it probably feels. It just needs a bit of attention, one thing at a time.