In a world famed for what money can buy, I never really felt any pride in what I was earning. The salary just existed, stashed away in cash, waiting for some large life event or emergency.

I think a lot of Muslims are acutely aware of all the things we should avoid with our money. The accounts we shouldn’t open, the debt we shouldn’t have and the things we shouldn’t buy. Which, of course all makes a lot of sense - but few people explain the halal alternatives to building wealth.

For years I consistently heard the hadith about tying your camel - that practical effort and trust in God go hand in hand. What I never quite grasped was why and how people spoke of this in all other contexts, except money.

Tying your camel with finances is relatively boring. You’ve got to open the right account, read the fund/stock factsheet and check whether what you own is halal. You might also have to set up a monthly transfer to your savings account. And on the surface, none of this feels spiritual; it’s admin - but admin here is the work.

The harder part comes after the setup. Pursuing God and chasing excellence aren’t two separate stages. Excellence means building habits that may stretch 10 to 20 years and setting intentions that will keep you accountable - both to yourself and God.

I ultimately know my ambitions, building wealth, giving back to my community are limitless, in the general sense - but I’m also very aware that nothing moves without God and what he has already written.

These days I don’t hide my wealth from God. I accept it as a means to do better, be better, provide for the poor and treat my family. But one thing I’ll never do is take my bank balance for granted - because truly, by His will, it could exist one day and not the next.

Everything held between dua and tawakkul, faith in God.

For most of my life, saving has been the habit I do best. Some months have been generous, others a little leaner, but it was always something I was conscious of doing when money came in. It gave me reassurance in an uncertain future - because who can really predict what’s coming?

In some ways, I became quite attached to the notion of being the person who saves diligently. Not in a boastful way; but in a way where people knew I wasn’t keen on spending money just for the sake of it.

Then this month, nothing went out.

Me saving over the years has worked. It has done exactly what I hoped it would do. It’s the sole reason I’m able to step back from my career for a bit and travel ‘round and round’ the Cabot trail with my family.

Every penny I put aside in the last eight years has been a vote for what exists right now. A small café in Toronto, an iced-orange lemonade, a laptop and these words.

I dared to step off the career ladder; and the most surprising thing is nothing has collapsed.

I want to be honest about what the last month has looked like without an income.

There are still things to pay for and things I’ve chosen to enjoy.

I’ve (stupidly but proudly) completed the Grouse Grind - two hours of straight stairs to the most phenomenal view of Vancouver. And I bought the Royal Mail Winnie the Pooh collection - an investment into a childhood memory of sitting on my bedroom floor reading A.A. Milne; ‘Waiting at the Window’ was my favourite poem.

As well as a core memory - driving down the Icefields Parkway - stop after stop of snow-capped mountains, crisp autumn air and a stretch in the driver’s seat (not sure how I was trusted with that one!)

I’ve often rolled my eyes at the sentence ‘you can’t put a price on that’ - but I think I understand it a little better now. People get busy, parents get older; and nobody quite knows which trip will be your last one together.

So who have I become when savings haven’t been the main focus?

The truth is, I think there’s still a bit of a transition from my super frugal ways - but I can tell you, that not once at the top of Moraine Lake’s Rock Pile did I think about what my money was doing (or how much I had spent to get there).

I was mostly thinking about my legs(!) - and the silly idea to scramble down the face of the Rock Pile instead of going back down the steps! And in that moment by the lake, I wasn’t a saver or a spender, I was just undeniably human, looking at the sunrise-kissed reflection of mountains I’d waited years to see.

I think I’d always assumed that without saving, there would be a gap between who I am and who I’m trying to be.

But I’ve come to realise, there isn’t. There’s just a little girl, with a book of poems, who finally made it to the Rockies.

I’m still frugal at heart and I’ll probably feel some relief when I start saving again. But this month I learnt that saving is just something I do, it doesn’t necessarily need to consume who I am.

Was the premium airline a good choice? Did I book accommodation too far away just to save money? Should I have done more with my days?

Was standing outside Rogers Centre in a three hour queue quite worth the Hello Kitty Game Day Merch? (It is a really nice bobblehead though!)

That’s the thing about spending money when you’re frugal. The more I pay for something, the more I expect from it. And it’s not just the money aspect, but the hours of research and planning; so in my mind, the whole thing should land somewhere near perfection.

But even when things go well, I start comparing everything I’ve enjoyed with everything I’ve missed out on - and the latter somehow becomes the longer list(!)

As someone who’s putting saving and investing at the forefront of my financial goals at the moment, I simply can’t help the fact that everything comes with a calculation - could I have made food at home for less? Does leaving an activity I’ve paid for early become a waste of money?

Because even though the money has been spent, apparently there’s still work to do - I have to make it worth it.

I’ve always had a number in mind for what I’d be happy to pay for something. Anything over it, I either pay it begrudgingly or go without. Like everyone, I earn my money through hard work and at some point I didn’t want to ‘waste’ it.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to rescue and justify the money I’ve spent over the years. So when people tell me ‘just enjoy yourself’ and I genuinely don’t understand how.

It’s never really been about affordability. It’s often difficult for me to let my purchase decision rest with the receipt. I find myself looking up reviews after buying something, testing out what I’ve bought and ultimately thinking a negative experience means I shouldn’t have spent the money in the first place.

The thing is, a restaurant can have brilliant reviews and still serve an average meal. A top I loved in a shop could sit unworn in my wardrobe for months. And a day I’ve spent weeks planning could start with grey skies and traffic.

When something disappoints, I quickly turn that into a judgement about myself. That I should have known, done more research or just simply chosen better. But most meals will be ordinary. Most days will have some great moments and some boring ones. There are bound to be queues, bad weather and places that look better on Instagram.

Investors actually have a name for this - ‘sunk cost’. Basically, money you’ve already lost/spent that you can’t get back; and the temptation is to keep ‘working’ to justify it. I also try to remind myself that a decision can be excellent and the outcome ordinary.

If you’re like me and you’ve saved well, you may find that spending well is the harder skill (I’m still working on it!)

I’m learning that a day where I’ve spent a lot of money doesn’t need to be a memory for life - it can be ordinary; and that’s okay.

Because each of those days is still a day in my life - it doesn’t become worthless just because I could have planned a better one.

The main event for the average person investing is a monthly payment that goes out of your bank account in the background. You might check the app a few times and see the numbers dip and rise. And for a long stretch, the number you see will look almost identical to the money you put in.

For some, that monthly payment, even if automated, can feel like a slow way to do it. I’ve certainly always held that logic in life - why drip-feed something when I could just do it altogether and be done with it.

So, if you’re like me, you’ve probably wondered if you should just invest once, and as it turns out the maths mostly agrees.

Lump sum investing allows you to put a large amount of money in at once - one day, one price. The falls and the gains feel a bit louder - but overall it has historically done better, as your money has longer to grow in the stock market.

But even with the research, I was a little skeptical until I ran the numbers myself. So here’s what your lump sum could become over 20 years of investing.

I’ve provided figures using roughly 10% a year before inflation and roughly 8% after (assuming 2% inflation rate).

Please note this is not finance advice, so please do your own research as investments can fall as well as rise, and you may get back less than you put in. I’d be cautious about investing a lump sum if you don’t have an emergency fund set up (to cover 3 to 6 months of living expenses).

In the hours after their passing - arranging the funeral, calling family, working out who else needed to know - my uncle walked calmly to the wardrobe for something that had been waiting for years.

Neatly folded on the top shelf was the white cloth the deceased would be buried in, their kaffan.

And beside it, an envelope of cash kept safely to cover their last rites.

I remember conversations in the weeks after the funeral, about how those two things put aside had made things easier - not the grief, but the logistics.

They had prepared for the one thing this life guarantees us all; death.

A few years later I watched my local mosque community raise money - not for a distant charitable cause, but for burial costs of a local man. And it wasn’t dramatic in any sense - a collection was started, a total that was reached and hands were raised in prayer - sabr (patience) of the living and forgiveness of the deceased.

The day of that second burial was honest and raw in more ways that I can commit to paper. But I made a promise to myself that day, that I’d try my best not to make that my scenario, God willing.

So I opened a new account and started putting some money aside each month - not for a house or education but for the day that would inevitably arrive.

My ghusl (obligatory washing before burial), kaffan, plot and burial - all paid in full before I ever owned a share or a savings account attached to a worldly future.

It felt scary at first. I was just starting my first full-time job, as were a lot of my friends; and as they talked about new cars and house deposits, I stayed silent because my first real salary felt like it was going somewhere a bit too personal to explain.

Funeral costs have risen since I first began saving, so the fund I have is still one I contribute to.

Based on current prices for where I live, this is approximately what I’m preparing for.

Please note these aren’t universal UK figures, as costs can vary quite considerably by region, cemetery and funeral provider.

• ghusl and kaffan, £500 (may be more if you need to transport the deceased to a facility)

• funeral director, £1,300

• salat al-Janazah/Imam, normally a voluntary donation from the family, £150

• grave digging and interment, £995

• grave selection, £170

• right of burial (adult, 99 years), £4,110

Total: £7,225

I never really expected the number to be that high. For a lot of people, I know death is often the last puzzle to be solved - but as a woman of faith, this savings pot is the most important one I’ll ever have.

I effectively have two emergency funds - one to cover six months of living expenses and one to relieve my family of any financial burden when my final day arrives.

So as much as I now build wealth for the opportunities it provides me; I realise I could only really begin doing that because I had closed the first door behind me.

If the worst happens, I now know my family won’t be left in hardship. I won’t be someone else’s financial emergency.

And everything I build going forwards is additive - which feels much lighter.

Even after I booked it, I kept wondering if taking an extended career break and travelling across North America with my mum was the wisest financial decision I could have made.

I’ve spent years becoming good at saving money. But spending it? That’s another matter.

I’ve always strived to live below my means, with no real desire to live a life that announces my wealth on the surface. As long as what I have is functional, I have no interest in upgrading.

I only learnt the word ‘frugal’ in my twenties, and recognised myself in it immediately.

Over the years I had noticed I didn’t want to spend money in the same way as my friends. I was usually the one with a savings goal and would rearrange my life for months at a time to achieve it. Saving felt sensible and it made me feel secure.

But somewhere along the way, I became so good at accumulating my money, that I began losing sight of what I was even doing it for.

I’ve been stuck in this uncomfortable middle ground for the last few years - wanting financial freedom and yet being afraid of the freedom I had already created.

Money will come and go - markets will rise and fall and salaries can be given and lost.

It wasn’t until the beginning of this year that I started questioning all the different forms wealth can take. Yet the things I had been neglecting whilst trying to protect my financial future - my health, time with loved ones, my interests, peace of mind - were not infinitely recoverable.

So, (obviously) I booked a trip. Not just any holiday, but a long one, on the other side of the Atlantic, with my mum.

One that would last long enough for us to not feel guilty about having down days. The kind I know I’ll look back on in fifteen years from now and be proud of how it shaped me and my relationships. The monetary value will be secondary to all of that; but that doesn’t mean paying for it was easy.

It is the biggest purchase I’ve ever made for myself and up until I left for the airport, I kept wondering whether I should retreat and invest all the money instead.

Now that I’m living through the trip, the money I’ve paid to be here doesn’t really cross my mind.

I won’t pretend the trip has been a perfect montage of magical moments - there have been missed buses, 13-hour airport delays and disrupted plans.

But there is a new definition of rich I feel so privileged to be experiencing:

• the picnics with my mum as we people watch along Lake Ontario

• joining a local fun run and sharing bagels with the locals at the finish line

• the pastries, SunnyD(!) and Canadian chocolates

• witnessing things I’d only ever read about (red sand beaches, lighthouses every twenty minutes, the longest bridge in Canada, the Niagara whirlpool)

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My savings allowed all of these to be possible.

I now realise there is a version of me that can spend money (as hard as it is sometimes) on things I simply want. Years of saving and building security gave me the option to step away from work, travel and consider what I want the next chapter of my life to look like.

I’m learning to appreciate that a rising bank balance isn’t the reward, it’s there to afford me choices in life. So, this is what I’ve chosen for now.

I came here for the notes and I’m leaving with nothing.

As impressive as their portfolio looks, I’m not going to tell you they did something clever - that they found a way to outperform the stock market in ways professionals try and fail to do.

The truth is, I’m staring at results from one good year. I’m not seeing the mistakes they made before this, the losses they didn’t post about and whether this strategy of theirs will still exist in five years from now.

Before I started investing, I’d scan the internet, thinking the goal was to find the right strategy - the one that gave me the best returns, the smartest allocations and the highest dividends. I’d scroll through someone’s full portfolio and there would be a niggle at the back of my mind where I thought ‘should I sell what I have and do what they’re doing instead?’

Except, I have no idea what that person’s life looks like - their rent/mortgage, how much they earn, the family they need to support. I don’t know what they’ll do when the market takes one of its dives or if they even have an emergency fund. I only know what they’re doing at the top of the chart, on a very good day.

My own plans have changed over the years - I saved for five years before the goal I was saving for stopped making sense. And the thing that saved me wasn’t a perfect strategy, it was that my existing one was simple and boring enough to survive the changes in my life.

As as far as investing goes, the biggest secret might be that the best strategy often isn’t the one with the best returns - it’s the one you carried on with for years. You didn’t abandon it after 3 months because it demanded too much of you - your attention, your confidence and your faith in an unfamiliar sector.

Instead of asking myself if ‘this is a good investment’, I now ask myself ‘can I keep this up even when everything in my life goes wrong for while?’ The latter is what tells me a lot more than what someone holds.

During my current career break, I won’t receive a salary. But because I planned for the break in advance, my investments are staying automated and at the same level. I didn’t want consistency to depend on every month of my life going perfectly (so I’m currently in the fortunate enough position to be investing from my savings).

The stock market can be joyous and devastating; but it doesn’t care how it makes you feel. A robust system that keeps you investing monthly is better than the odd investment in a shiny new stock you hoped would be the next Bitcoin or Nvidia.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be ambitious and have a six-figure wealth goal. I’m just saying that before you duplicate someone else’s approach, ask yourself what assumptions you’re making about the life they live.

A strategy built for somebody with no dependents, a high tolerance of risk and lots of disposable income will never translate cleanly to a life that looks entirely different.

You don’t need a strategy that will produce the most impressive screenshot - you need one you can still be following in , five, ten, twenty years from now.

By the third one, I was conscious that people would notice (and they probably did!) But it was also one of the first times I realised that repeating an outfit wasn’t the part I felt uncomfortable about - the uncomfortable part was believing it required an explanation.

There were times in my childhood where money wasn’t abundant and we just had to make do with what we had. That was completely manageable until you added the expectations that came with being part of a South Asian community. So I became very good at making it look as though we were doing fine.

I learnt to ration what people saw - my one pair of smart shoes at the fancy occasions, photos of my holiday; and charity as it was expected of me (and not a penny more).

Looking back, I don’t think what I absorbed was simply vanity. It was a form of social insurance. How you showed made your family’s success and your own worth legible to other people.

People who appeared overly careful with money were noted as suspicious - as though being frugal revealed that something had gone wrong. So visible spending became one of the clearest ways to prove that life was going well.

Spending never really felt like a personal choice, it was shaped by what people would say about you afterwards.

Turns out I may not have been imagining this dynamic for the last 15 years! A large UK study on minority ethnic consumer habits found that five in six people from minority ethnic backgrounds buy luxury goods, compared to fewer white individuals (four in six).

The research doesn’t explain every motive behind those purchases, but the difference made my own experience feel less isolated.

Visible consumption doesn’t necessarily mean financial security (no matter how social media portrays it). A 2026 socio-economic survey of British Muslims found that almost 30% of British Muslims struggled to pay at least one household bill in the past year. It also found that 43% had to borrow money (including from family) to cover everyday costs.

The same survey also revealed that while British Muslims give generously in charity, many people are hesitant to ask for help themselves. Amongst those struggling with bills, only 4.5% had asked for help.

These studies look at different groups, so they can’t quite be compared neatly side by side. But together they do gravitate towards a tension I grew up recognising - visible wealth can coexist with considerable financial pressure; and those experiencing such pressures may be very determined not to let anyone else see it.

There may be another layer hidden behind such appearances - financial responsibility doesn’t always stop with the individual. Among my own friends, many of us are now providing financial support for our parents. So that same person who’s maintaining a stable, put-together front for the community may also be propping up the finances at home.

I began stepping away from these performative ways in my teenage years. The pressure was excruciating and I just wasn’t living life in a way that felt true to me.

Until you step away, you don’t realise how exhausting it is to constantly register what everyone is wearing or what car they’re driving. So I relieved myself and started to take a sense of pride in my capsule wardrobe and my minimalist bracelet.

But even as I look around now, I see the game being played: ‘can I afford this’ vs ‘can I afford to be seen not affording this’ - which are not always the same question.

This isn’t to suggest that very expensive purchases are all performance - but I think it is worth asking how much of our spending reflects our own tastes and interests, and how much of it is designed to be a show piece for other people.

Before buying something visible now, I try to mentally walk myself through these three questions:

• Do I genuinely like it?

• Can I comfortably afford it (twice over)?

• Would I still want it if nobody else ever saw it?

I remember asking for a raise at my last job - it was already a title I didn’t quite feel ready to step into. And there I was, asking for a salary I knew I’d worked for, but wasn’t supposed to keep.

When it all, to my surprise, got approved - I calculated how much extra I’d be taking home after tax each month and did the diligent thing of moving it into savings. I felt like the extra money I’d been granted needed somewhere safer to sit. Maybe it wasn’t a strategy at all. Perhaps I was just hiding behind fear of not really knowing how to handle my finances.

I was aligning myself to the old scoreboard methodology. Work hard, save up, buy something solid - only then are you allowed to enjoy it.

But the buy needs to be something tangible - a new car, a laptop - pretty much something you could show others who could nod and smile at your purchases as a way of validation.

I’m frugal by choice, so there’s not a whole lot I buy, which also, in a way, means I’ve missed out on the presence of my wealth amongst others. I don’t have all these new shiny items to pull out to prove I’m building financial independence and stability. But then, I’ve never been one to live for the opinions of others.

So, when I booked flights to, from and around Canada for me and my family, for a two and a half month trip - that guilt of spending showed up. Although this time I have no future asset to point to.

All I have are some e-tickets, time, distance and money leaving my account at a pace faster than I’d like.

A holiday doesn’t compound. It just sits in minus. And in a decade it may just be memories and a few photos.

When I was booking it all, I kept doing this thing where I priced it against ‘what could have been’. I’m not sure why I’ve always let my joy have a cost-benefit analysis before I allow it to happen.

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So when scrolling through Rightmove, I wasn’t looking for my dream house to live in, but rather something that would be a good return on investment - and a property rented to tenants was the only shape I’d ever really seen investment take.

Every spare pound of mine went towards making it a reality. It’s simply what I thought wealth looked like - you worked, saved and eventually you bought a property.

I read the news a lot and started seeing all these headlines about landlords giving up and selling up. So I did the research and ran the numbers. House prices going up, income rates (for property) going up, agent’s management fees rising and changes to tenant’s rights. And suddenly it didn’t really appeal anymore.

So I left that behind, but was still sat with a savings pot I wasn’t really sure what to do with. And as grateful as I was for all I had built over the years, the balance was making me quite stressed, because the cash wasn’t doing anything.

I knew there must be another way.

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One for daily wear (walks, errands, driving), one for work and one spare for when one of the first two pairs give up on me. And I’ve never once been tempted to upgrade.

But I will pay extra for a direct flight every time, especially when travelling with family. I’ll pay for a laptop that doesn’t lag through heavy tasks and a camera with all the modern features.

Other little purchases, that really only last a few minutes, I tend to avoid - coffees on my way to or from work, bottled water and lunches/dinners out (I much prefer home-cooked meals).

For a long time I saw this as an inconsistency. Frugal in some aspects of my life, indulgent in others with no real logic connecting the two. But I don’t think it’s quite that anymore.

My shoes are actually the clue, not the contradiction. For me, a £7 pair of daily shoes do the exact same job as a £70 pair. I just need shoes that get me from A to B, are comfortable and go with everything I wear. If anything, owning the same pair also saves me from thinking about what shoes to put on. There’s really nothing to buy back there. No version of a nicer shoe will hand me a better day.

A direct flight is a little different. A connection isn’t just a stop, sometimes it’s a worse experience as you sit around a departure lounge - hours of my life I’ll never get back. A saving, that in many cases, I’ll forget about when I get to my destination.

In that realm, good tech is the same for me. I’ve always worked with Macs and because I do a lot of design and editing work, the speed and performance are worth paying for. Even a couple of seconds lag, compounded over hours of daily use would add up.

I do think our relationship with money is intertwined with our beliefs of pleasure - what we think it should cost, whether we think it has to be earned and when we allow ourselves to have it.

I’m not sure I was ever really viewing it as frugal-versus-indulgent. For me, the dividing line often seems to be whether spending more buys me back time. I’d prefer not to pay more for things that leave me exactly where I started.

I think this is what we sometimes misunderstand about people who get labelled as ‘frugal’. We read frugality as self-denial, earning pleasure through restraint and rationing joy until we’ve proven we deserve it. But I’m not denying myself the £70 pair, I just genuinely don’t want them. Spending more, in my book, wouldn’t give me added satisfaction.

So maybe being good with money isn’t necessarily about becoming better at denying yourself pleasure but figuring out which pleasures are actually yours.

Someone else might get great enjoyment from beautiful shoes and happily take the connecting flight. I’d do the opposite. And neither of us is more disciplined than the other - we simply decided that different things are worth paying for.

So, the expensive shoes can stay on the shop shelf and I’ll take the direct flight because I know exactly what I’m buying - five hours of my life back.

Money was never really about things, it was about what I was willing to let it cost me.

If I could just save every penny and get there, I’d finally feel that ‘financial security’ I’d heard about.

But it turns out that once I crossed the finish line, everything I thought was waiting for me on the other side, only existed in my head.

I still remember that payslip coming in that tipped the scales, quietly and proudly showing my parents on my phone - but in the weeks and months following, I was kept awake some nights wondering what I was supposed to do with it all.

At this point I’d been saving to buy a house outright.

For years I’d done what felt comfortable; putting money away instead of spending it. I’d become frugal by choice and I had no interest in designer clothes, new cars or keeping up with what everyone else was doing.

Little by little my savings grew and I recall walking back from work, opening my banking app and seeing what I’d spent years building on my screen (finally!)

I walked home with a little more pride. Not because £100,000 is a magic number but because of what it represented for me. A sort of delayed gratification for all the decisions nobody else ever saw me make.

But within 10 minutes of that walk, the feeling was gone. The figure just sat there and the longer it did, the more my thoughts consumed me.

Was I supposed to just go out and buy a house now?

Buy the latest car when I already had something perfectly functional?

Book the luxury holidays I’d ‘earned’?

Quit my job for a year (and do what?)

So naturally, I went looking for the answers. Every article, every conversation, I was trying to find the glimmer of rulebook for once I had ‘enough’. And the more I delved deeper, the more I realised that none of it actually appealed to me.

Looking back, I don’t think the money made me anxious, it was the expectation stapled to it.

Somehow, I’d absorbed this idea that wealth should turn you into someone else. An individual with more ambition, more confidence, more willing to chase the next goal.

Then one day I had a ‘lightbulb moment’. I was sat on holiday with a compound interest calculator open on my laptop. An investing article open on another tab.

My money didn’t have to sit there making me feel guilty, in fact I didn’t have to spend it at all. I could put it to work, in the background, for a future I actually valued.

The first account I opened was actually Wahed (but I’ve since moved to Trading212). I put in £200 and just watched it for a few months to see what it meant to invest. And true to form, the number went up, it went down - it followed the markets.

In hindsight, investing didn’t just change how I managed my money, it gave me permission to stop moving towards some skewed version of success I never quite believed in.

I still don’t measure success by the size of someone’s house or the badge on their car. I find more in a good afternoon of following a trail through the woods, sharing a picnic and conversation with those I hold close.

Money doesn’t ever arrive with instructions of who you should become.

But my promise is to never become the individual people try to fashion me into.

Because if money gives me anything, I hope it’s not a new identity.

I hope it’s the freedom to walk home exactly as I am.

The scale makes me stop, every time, as my brain tries to comprehend the life it once carried.

I’ve stood across from that piece various times over the last ten years, different friends by my side - but always in awe.

Museums have always had a strange effect on me. They hold memories and preserve moments that have come to term. Every object defined and labeled. But I guess real life isn’t quite that way.

When I look at my own life now, I realise I carry my own sort of museum. Not of preserved hearts (although that would be nice), but of the varying lives I almost lived. And as much as I’ve never lived them, they still feel like great losses.

In my 20s I truly felt like every door was still open. In fact, the door was revolving and those decisions could be reversed - I could redirect.

But as the years pass, some of those doors have quietly shut, others have been locked behind me - and I find myself navigating within limitations.

My friends have settled into respective careers. The people I held closest have moved miles away (physically and otherwise). And focuses change - businesses, new chapters, families begin.

With all of it - my museum has grown.

The money section didn’t exist until my late 20s and yet years on, it’s the largest.

There were shares I almost bought, the property that would have doubled in value, the business I never started (and failed) and the city and people I never gave a chance because building ‘home’ again felt daunting.

Our imagined lives bask in the enjoyment of something our real lives never will: perfect editing.

The comparison is wondering where we could have been with different choices, which is wildly unfair, because the imaginary life has never had to pay the full price for existing.

The more people I meet, the more I realise every path has a cost. The promotion may have brought on longer hours and a political dynamic. The investment that multiplied tenfold may have required patience of many years of terrifying volatility. The individual we admired at a distance may just be as wonderfully and frustratingly human as the rest of us.

But my museum negates all of that. It only seems to highlight the parts that hurt.

And it’s something I notice in a lot of finance conversations. People often never note the investment they avoided by a margin that then collapsed, but instead they remember the one that went up 500% and they missed the boat.

We’re human (unfortunately) and we tend to measure ourselves against all the outcomes we missed - it’s practically an impossible standard(!)

This is why investing can feel surprisingly personal and emotional. What if I had started earlier? Taken more risk? Knew exactly what the future would hold?

But nobody knew; and that’s the part my museum doesn’t tell you. My decisions today propel me forwards, my memories from yesterday keep me still.

So when I cast my eye around my museum, I hasten to shut the door - because those are from a life I was never meant to live. They weren’t stolen from me, they were just never meant to be mine.

And unlike every exhibit in the museum, my story, financially driven, or otherwise - is still unfinished.

After seven hours I took the effort to make a cup of tea I never drank.

Then the recovery software’s progress bar hit ninety-two percent and just stayed there. I stared at it for way too long and forced myself out for a walk.

Somewhere along that walk, it all began to blur and I stopped thinking about the files and started thinking about money.

Not quite because of what I’d lost, but because of what I was willing to spend to get it back. I started weighing the cost of professional data recovery against my own patience - wondering if I should finally admit defeat.

A failed hard drive isn’t a financial problem; until it is.

And it took me sitting on my floor at midnight, plugging and unplugging the same cable for the fortieth time(!), to realise my emergency fund isn’t just there for broken cars or unexpected bills. Sometimes it’s there to buy me choices when something I never planned for suddenly goes wrong.

I’d known for years that I was supposed to back it up. But that action asked something of me, in exchange for a disaster that may never come. And for years, it never did.

Like any insurance, every day you don’t pay it and nothing happens, is proof to your own tired brain, that skipping it was fine.

It’s the same logic I used to have about savings, before I actually built any. I had this mentality that I’d just sort things out when they arose. Because something happening was never a certainty - and well, how bad could it ever really get?

By hour fourteen, I wasn’t bargaining with the software anymore, I was bargaining with myself and praying with every percentage that moved.

I told myself, if I get this back, I’ll finally buy a second drive (no matter how extortionate the price!) If I get this back, I’ll stop treating ‘luck’ like a strategy.

It’s an odd thing to realise after spending an entire day worrying about a block of aluminium. But at 2am I realised that I’ve built discipline in other areas of my life, especially my finances. I’ve got an ISA. A diversified portfolio of halal funds. I’ve spent years learning not to put all my eggs in one basket.

And yet I’d put almost everything I’d worked on onto a single hard drive.

I got most of it back in the end (my RAW photo files were sacrificed as they kept overheating the drive!) But I’ve accepted they’re just gone now and I’m still working out how I feel about it - just a bout of grief I didn’t anticipate on a random Saturday.

My second drive is already on the way. Not because I suddenly trust myself more. But because seventeen hours taught me something I couldn’t have learned any faster; that redundancy isn’t pessimism, it’s just what it looks like to stop assuming I’ll be lucky next time too.

We often talk about not putting all our eggs in one basket as though it’s just money advice. But here’s the reminder that it applies to almost everything else too.

I weirdly assumed the umpire barely had a job anymore.

Most of the line calls happen automatically now. ‘In, out, fault.’ A speaker announces the decision before anyone even looks towards the umpire’s chair. The line judges have gone, replaced by cameras that seem remarkably certain of themselves.

But the umpire is still there.

Not because every point needs them, but because every so often something happens that the technology can’t judge. A racket clips the ball twice. The ball brushes the net. A player gets in the way. Moments that only make sense if someone has been watching the whole match, not just the last half-second.

And it got me wondering how much of life is made up of automatic calls that I’ve quietly accepted without ever asking where they came from.

My retirement age is probably the biggest one.

When I was younger, sixty-five felt oddly personal, as though somebody had looked at an average life, thought carefully about it and decided that was the right moment to stop working. The goalposts have already moved to sixty-seven and they’ll probably move again before I get there.

The funny thing is, nobody has ever looked at my life.

Nobody asked whether I’d enjoy my work enough to carry on, or whether I’d want to stop twenty years earlier. Nobody weighed up what would make sense for me. I guess it was never supposed to be a balanced decision.

It’s just a default.

Maybe a sensible one when you’re building a pension system for millions of people. But it’s still a default and I think we sometimes mistake those for truth.

The more I’ve thought about retiring early, the less it becomes about the money, even though finances are what make it possible. It’s become more about recognising that so many of the timelines I’ve inherited were never written with me in mind. They were written for the masses, which means they weren’t written for anyone in particular.

I’m not interested in rejecting every rule. Plenty of them exist for good reason and I’m sure they were built by people who understood things I never will.

I’d just like to know which decisions came from someone who’d actually been watching the whole match...

...and which ones were only ever the default setting.

Retiring early, for me, is really about escaping work. It’s about giving myself the freedom to question a timetable I never remember agreeing to in the first place.

When I first started investing, I spent far too much time trying to work out whether I was making the right decisions. I read articles, watched videos, compared platforms and worried about choosing the wrong thing. I was convinced everyone else understood something I didn’t.

Looking back, I think I confused complexity with competence.

The reality is that beginning to invest doesn’t require an encyclopaedic knowledge of financial markets. It requires a handful of sensible decisions, taken in the right order, and the confidence to make a start.

That is exactly why I put this free guide together.

It follows the same four steps I’ve been sharing across my recent video series. Something tangible, designed to help you take your first step with clarity rather than confusion.

• Part 1 - Platform

• Part 2 - ISA, Individual Savings Account

• Part 3 - ETF, Exchange Traded Fund

• Part 4 - Automate

More often than not, the greatest barrier to investing isn’t a lack of knowledge - it’s the confidence and belief that you’re allowed to start and learn along the way.

You can download my free guide below - I hope it helps!

Beginner's Guide to Investing, July 2026 (ayesha.rooted)

724KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Please note: This guide is educational and reflects my personal approach to long-term investing. It is not personalised financial advice.

Download

And yet if you hand the same ETF to ten different people - you’ll get ten very different results.

Some people buy and genuinely forget. Not in a boastful ‘I don’t check my portfolio’ way - but they actually forget(!) A bit like how you set up a direct debit three years ago, and suddenly realise you still have Amazon Prime.

Others build out a spreadsheet, a concrete plan for exactly when they’ll buy and when they’ll sell; and then quietly override it the first time it’s tested.

Some will treat a 4% dip like local weather, mildly inconvenient, gone by Thursday. Others treat it like a sure verdict on every decision they’ve ever made with money.

I also know people who can explain compound interest beautifully and still can’t sit still through a red week. And others who couldn’t tell you what an expense ratio is and have never once panic-sold anything, because it genuinely doesn’t occur to them to look.

I’ve come to think the real ‘play’ in the stock market has almost nothing to do with financial literacy.

What seems to actually predict how someone invests is how they handle uncertainty everywhere else in their life. That friend who needs to know exactly how a trip will go before they book it is often the same person who needs to know exactly what the market will do before they’ll commit to it - and, I hate to break it to them, but neither certainty is available, ever.

Then there’s the friend who’s comfortable saying ‘I don’t know, we’ll figure it out’ when plans change. Now, those are the ones that can hold an investment through a bad 4-months without needing to narrate it to themselves every day.

The perfectionists, that includes me(!), struggle in a specific way. We delay starting because we haven’t found the ‘right’ fund yet, or the ‘right’ moment, and in the meantime the actual cost of waiting quietly outweighs whatever we’re optimising for.

One person I know who likes control, struggles differently - they can automate a monthly contribution, but they can’t resist “just checking,” because checking feels like a form of control even when it changes nothing.

And then there’s my most interesting friend: she’s anxious about almost everything else in life, but strangely calm about money. I think it’s because somewhere along the way she decided money wasn’t where her anxiety was allowed to live. It’s not that she doesn’t feel anything. It’s that she’s drawn the line somewhere else.

Almost ironically, none of this shows up in a fund factsheet. Nobody puts ‘suits people who can tolerate ambiguity’ on an ETF page. Even though it might be the single most useful piece of information for choosing how to invest, not just what to invest in.

I think this is why so much financial advice needs to sit alongside behaviours. Myself included, we often assume the gap between ‘knowing what to do’ and ‘doing it’ is a knowledge gap, but for a lot of people, the gap isn’t knowledge. It’s temperament. And no chart has ever talked someone out of a feeling.

Maybe the more honest starting point when investing isn’t ‘which ETF should I choose’ but ‘what kind of person am I when things are uncertain, and can my plan survive that person.’

Because honestly, the maths was never really the hard part.

The person doing the maths was.

The headlines blamed Apple. Something about raising prices because of memory and AI costs. I’m not sure whether that was really the reason, but the market had found an excuse to fall and my portfolio had gone with it.

The stupid thing is, I know how this works. I’ve read the books. Done my research a hundred times over. Markets never move in straight lines and one bad day tells you almost nothing about the next twenty years. I know all of that. But none of that stopped me from immediately asking ‘what if I’ve got this all wrong?’

The losses themselves weren’t what bothered me most. It was what they’d interrupted. For the last few months, I’ve caught myself opening the app more often than I should. Not to buy anything, but just to look. Watching the numbers creep upwards. Letting myself imagine the future they might one day buy.

And for me, that’s not a new wardrobe or a lavish open plan house – but freedom. The possibility that one day work becomes a choice rather than something I have to do. I’m chasing the feeling that my time belongs to me.

When my portfolio falls, that dream doesn’t disappear. It just feels like someone has moved it a little further away, inch by inch.

I always imagined successful investors felt detached. Calm, almost clinical. The type of people who barely notice a bad day. Turns out, I notice them all.

I thought experience made you immune to days like this.

Instead, I started wondering whether I’d misunderstood something everyone else could see. I started looking for evidence I’d been wrong all along. I opened the app again five minutes later, as though the market might have apologised while I was finishing my tea.

It’s 48 hours later – no apology just yet.

This feels embarrassing to admit, but there’s an element of loneliness too. Most people around me don’t invest and the people who do aren’t the ones I’d message to say, “My halal ETF is down and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

So you just sit with it.

You remind yourself that this is exactly what long-term investing looks like.

That markets have recovered from days far worse than this one.

That you believed in these investments on Thursday and probably will again.

Probably once they’re green.

And so you wait for your emotions to catch up with what your brain already knows.

I’m writing this on Sunday morning. My portfolio is still down. I haven’t sold anything. Tomorrow it might recover - or it might fall again. Either way, Monday morning I’ll probably check it before work.

Maybe that’s what long-term investing really is. Not feeling calm all the time. Just refusing to let today’s emotions rewrite yesterday’s conviction.

I’ve used it twice.

It now lives in a pile on my dining room table, somewhere between work papers, a few personal notes and pages I’ve torn from my notebook. The exact pile it was supposed to replace.

I keep meaning to sell it - I haven’t done that either.

The annoying thing is that I didn’t buy it impulsively. Impulse purchases are easy to understand - you see something, you want it, you buy it.

I’d actually thought about this for months. I’d watched reviews, compared prices and waited for the right one. And then I finally found one at a second hand computer fair, negotiated the price and walked away feeling great. The purchase felt sensible and intentional.

I’ve been watching Matt D’Avella for years. If you haven’t heard of him, he makes videos about habits, minimalism and intentional living. Beautifully put together - the sort of lifestyle where everything seems to have a place. I don’t think his videos convinced me to buy an iPad. But they did convince me that organised people use iPads.

Most of us like to think we buy things because of what they do. Sometimes we buy them because of what they say about us. For example, running shoes say you’re a runner. A camera says you’re a photographer. An expensive notebook says you’re finally going to write every day. And my iPad hinted I’m the kind of person that has a system.

Thing is, although I had the iPad in my hand, the identity part arrives a bit later.

I’ve noticed that genuinely useful purchases rarely require much imagination. My new laptop replaced one that was painfully slow. My passport was renewed because reality demanded it.

And my iPad required a story. It relied on a version of me that was slightly ahead of where I actually am. A person with a clean desk, a proper workflow, colour-coded notes, weekly planning sessions. The sort of person who would open an iPad every morning and immediately know what to do with it. That version of me was completely believable but almost just out of reach.

I don’t think I was stupid, but I was hopeful. These purchases are hard to spot. The need underneath them is often real - I wanted a better system, after feeling overwhelmed by loose notes and scattered reminders. What I bought was the feeling that the problem was about to be solved. The purchase felt like progress.

And maybe that’s why I still haven’t sold it. Because the moment I do, I lose more than an unused device. I lose the possibility attached to it - the version of me who finally gets organised.

The funny thing is that the pile underneath it is still there. Notes to myself, half-finished to-do lists. Evidence of how I actually operate. Not efficiently, not aesthetically, not minimally. Which turns out to be enough.

I still watch Matt D’Avella. I still admire what he’s built. But somewhere along the way admiration stopped turning into aspiration - because his life isn’t mine.

And it’s a question worth asking myself before I buy things now. Not can I afford this? Or do I need it? But, who am I buying this for? The person I am today, or the person I’m hoping to become?

Because if it’s the latter, I want to understand what makes me think this purchase will succeed where all the others failed.

The iPad is still sitting there. Waiting, I suppose, for someone to become the person who bought it.

And somewhere along the line, I absorbed it all.

My mum came to this country as a toddler. Her parents came with less than that. By the time I arrived, there was enough. Enough to eat, enough to wear, enough to not worry.

But enough and relaxed are quite different. The memory of not-enough doesn’t leave a family just because circumstances change. It survives in habits, but also in assumptions - about what things cost, what risks are worth taking, what counts as wasteful.

This is not poverty. I want to be clear about that. This is the inheritance of it.

We bought Happy Shopper and Panda Pops. Tesco Value everything - blue-and-white stripes on the beans, the oven chips, the biscuits, the pasta. I walked the length of the high street because the milk was 2p cheaper at the other end. Packed lunch every day. Full Primark outfits before Primark had a reputation, when it was just where you went because the £1 t-shirt made sense.

None of this felt like deprivation, it felt normal. The carefulness was so woven into daily life, that I didn’t have a word for it until I was old enough to notice that other people didn’t live this way.

Some families just bought things. Without the pause or the background noise of can we, should we, is it worth it? I remember finding that genuinely strange.

The poverty premium is usually described as structural - poor people pay more, smaller packs, no bulk-buys, no car to reach the cheaper supermarket.

But there’s a psychological premium that runs alongside that. The one that gets handed down like your grandmother’s prayer mat. The one that doesn’t care that the original conditions no longer apply.

My grandparents paid it because they had to. My parents paid it because the habit was already formed. I pay it now, sometimes, in a currency that has nothing to do with money, in the reflex price-check before buying something small, in the faint guilt that occasionally accompanies paying full price for something I can comfortably afford. Not because I need to. Because the instinct is older than the income.

What I cannot fully untangle is how much of this is wisdom and how much of this is fear wearing wisdom’s clothes?

The careful spending, the long-term thinking, the resistance to lifestyle inflation - these serve me. They are part of why I invest, why I save, and why I think about money with intention rather than anxiety.

But I also can’t pretend they were freely chosen. They were handed to me, fully formed, by people who learned them in a context I never lived. I got the lesson without the life that explained it.

That’s the inheritance. Not trauma, exactly, but something quieter and harder to name.

My parents wanted better for me. They built it carefully, deliberately, quite literally 2p at a time. That careful becomes its own kind of inheritance that you can pass down - unconsciously, certain you’re giving something good.

I’m still working out which parts of them are mine. And yet, every time I clock the price of milk, I think of my grandparents and everything they carried so I wouldn’t have to; and I don’t think I’d want it any other way.