How I Manage My Money: Charity worker, on £2,500 a month, wants £1m in savings by 50

In our How I Manage My Money series we aim to find out how people in the UK are spending, saving and investing money to meet their costs and achieve their goals. This week we speak to Lauren Thorpe, 28, who lives in Sheffield with her partner, Charlie, 28. Lauren works in fundraising at an NHS charity. She wants to have £1m in savings and investments by the age of 50 and is not sure the state pension will exist when she is older. Monthly budget My monthly income: The take-home pay from my full-time NHS charity job is about £2,000 a month. I also make around £500 a month from various side hustles, including providing user generated content for brands, brand partnership work on social media and taking part in market research. My partner works as an electrical linesman, taking home around £2,800 per month. Our monthly outgoings: Mortgage, £1,023; groceries, £300 to £350; council tax, £170; gas and electric, £130; water, £47; TV licence, £15; broadband, £30; life insurance, £30; gym, £13; car fuel, £100; contact lenses, £22; sofa payment, £50; money for joint spending like eating out, £200. We put money into different pots each month for things like travel and gifts. We also each invest in a stocks and shares ISA. I add about £200 to £300 to my stocks and shares ISA each month. Five per cent of my pay goes into my workplace pension each month and my company contributes 6 per cent. I only really shop second-hand for clothes or look for things on sale. I spend £15 a month on a choir I’m part of and have just started ice-skating, costing £50 a month for classes and time on the rink. I wasn’t taught about money when I was growing up. It just wasn’t talked about a lot. It would have been good to have been taught about things like the different types of accounts available, how to start saving for a house deposit and investing. I used to live payslip to payslip and was a serial over-spender in the first few years of my career. I’d spend money on horrible cheap clothes I knew I’d never wear. After studying primary education at university, I taught in primary schools for a few years. I now work at an NHS charity, earning about £30,000 a year before deductions. Shorts A few years ago I started taking some free online financial literacy courses so I could learn more about money. After I left teaching, I set up a TikTok channel (@learningmoneyloz) and a year ago started focusing on personal finance education and basic budgeting tips. I feel I need to boost my income with side-hustles. I film videos for brands and they pay me to use them. I also resell clothes and furniture we don’t need anymore on platforms like Vinted and Facebook Marketplace. I recently switched my current account and got a £170 switching bonus. Aside from side-hustles, I try to save money by walking rather than taking the bus to work. I like free activities including walking and reading in the evenings. There’s a firm in New Zealand called Friends That Invest that got me into investing. I listened to the owner’s podcast on investing and read her book. I then started reading other books about investing and made my first investment at the age of 25 with an exchange-traded fund on Vanguard. I add £200 to £300 a month to my stocks and shares ISA, which has around £10,000 in it. As a couple, we also add about £1,000 to various savings pots with Monzo. We also have about £7,000 in a high-interest savings rate with Chase as an emergency pot. My goal is to have £1m in investments and savings by the time I am 50. To achieve this I will need to invest more and increase my income. I want to get back into schools and educate children about money while boosting my own savings. Saving and scrimping won’t make me wealthy. I need to keep diversifying my income streams. I live in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in Sheffield which we purchased in July 2023 for £250,000 using a £25,000 deposit. Our mortgage interest rate is 4.7 per cent and we took out a five-year fix which expires next year. I add 5 per cent of my NHS charity job pay into a defined benefit pensions scheme, while my employer contributes 6 per cent. I have about £5,000 in my current work pension. I’ve switched the fund to the highest risk one available and am considering opening a self-invested personal pension to transfer everything into. I want to be in a position where work could be optional for me by the age of around 45 to 50. I want to be able to do something I am passionate about by that point. I could not survive solely on the state pension in later life. I’m not even sure the state pension will exist by the time I reach that age. I now view money as a tool to enhance my life and am motivated by watching my money grow. As I’ve said, I’m working towards having £1m in investments and savings by the age of 50. I also want to help educate more people about basic budgeting and money management. Want to take part in How I Manage My Money? Email money@theipaper.com