Tez Ilyas: I don’t have a pension, but I dream one day I’ll have millions

In our How I Manage My Money series we aim to find out how people are spending, saving and investing to meet their costs and achieve their goals. This week, in our celebrity edition, comedian and actor Tez Ilyas, 43, tells us about growing up in a household with barely £500 in the bank, paying off thousands of pounds of debt, his £4,500 car bill and why he still worries about financial security despite his success. When did you first learn about money? I grew up with a single mum for the longest time. I was about six years old when she married my stepdad. I didn’t really know as a kid, but we didn’t have very much money growing up. We always got ice cream when the ice cream van came around and fish and chips on a Friday, but that’s because my mum didn’t spend any money on herself. She would make so many sacrifices and I didn’t even realise. She would go to the market and buy like five cardigans for a tenner for herself so we could have what we wanted. Shorts I remember once coming home and asking my mum if we had £5,000 in the bank. She laughed at me so hard and said: “We don’t even have £500.” When did you first start earning money? I had a paper run when I was 14. My first ever paycheck, I think, was about £2.75. I was a good saver in my teens and when I eventually got to £100, I thought, wow, what am I going to buy with this? Then my mum suggested I buy my sister a wedding gift. I had about £101.75, and she said she could get her a nice ring with this. That was my entire life savings. My entire life’s work went on this one ring for my sister. But I look back now and I’m so glad my mum did that. I left university though with two maxed-out overdrafts, a maxed-out store card, a maxed-out credit card and a £10,000 career development loan, as well as my student loan. How did you get out of debt? I went to London for a graduate job in the civil service and was living hand-to-mouth for a couple of years. I felt like I was poor for the first three or four years, just maxing out my overdraft every month. In 2012, when the Olympics happened, I was part of organising the event and everyone in the team got a £2,500 bonus. I cleared my credit cards and store cards off. That was the first time I went into the black. I barely touched an overdraft since and that was like 14 years ago. Then, I was able to start saving, putting £50 a month here, £100 there. Has comedy given you financial security? Things are great, and if things carry on like this for the next 25 years, it would be fine. But there’s no guarantee that any of this is going to carry on beyond next year. If I have a dry year, I might be alright, but if I have two dry years in a row, I will be in a bit of trouble. A lot of people know me from the few acting jobs I’ve done, and then they assume that I’m rich. I did one acting job over three seasons five years ago. You’re stuck in this kind of position where people assume you’re rich and you don’t want to tell them otherwise. But then you’re also like, come on, support my art. And they’re like, oh no, but you’re rich. And you’re like, I’m not though. So, why don’t you buy tickets? What is your biggest spending weakness? Eating out. I eat out about four or five times a week. A friend of mine recently said: “The problem with you, Tez, is you see food as pleasure rather than fuel.” He’s right. I think it’s probably what I spend the most amount of money on – in the region of £200 a week, I’d say. I go somewhere and a burger is like £14.50, and I just pay it. Sometimes I question it and say to myself, “Sorry, hang on, am I paying £14 for a burger? What am I doing?” What is the most expensive mistake you’ve made? I’m giving up my Audi Q5, and I found out that I’ve gone so over my mileage, I now have to pay an excess of £4,500. We all have this incompetence tax that we pay every single year, whether it’s a parking fine, whether you’ve returned something late, or whether you forgot to return something that you were meant to, and now you’re stuck with it. But £4,500 is steep. I also bought a house in 2023. We could have fixed our interest rate at 3.8 per cent. And I was like, no, they’ll come down, so we went variable. That decision has probably cost us about £6,000 or £7,000 over the last couple of years. Are you saving for retirement? I don’t pay into a pension now. I’ve got a dream that one day I’m going to earn millions, and then I’m going open up a self-invested pension pot (SIPP), and in SIPPs, you can backdate three years’ worth of money [the Government allows a carry forward system where you can use unused annual allowances from the three previous tax years]. Every year I’m like, I should just open up a SIPP and put into it what I can now. And for some reason in my head, I’m like, until that happens, I’m refusing to open up a SIPP. I’ve got a civil service pension that I paid into for 10 years, and I’ve no idea how much it’s worth. I’ve got an ISA that I put a bit of money into every single year. What is your best piece of money advice? Obviously, service your debts immediately. If you’ve got high interest debts like credit cards, store cards – just pay it. Then when you’re into the black, split your money into four parts: your bills, your living costs, your savings and whatever your dream thing is, whether it’s a dream holiday or a dream car. Just get into a habit as quickly as you can of saving, even if it’s not that much. Tez Ilyas is touring the UK with his new stand-up show, Tez Things I Hate About You, from September to November 2026, with dates including London’s Hackney Empire on 30 October and the Lowry in Salford on 28 November.