Back to Blog
The Rebel Alliance14/10/2023
At first it was just the two of us running Rebel Finance School (RFS). Then a few awesome people joined us and helped. That grow into the Rebel Ninjas, a team of wonderful people who help answer questions and support people. With the increased size of the course, publicity and volume of questions comes an increased responsibility.
With great power comes great responsibility. Responsibility to you
This year at one of the meetups someone came to us and asked us a question. They laid out their situation having been forced to move a big pension when they left employment and ended up with St James's Place (SJP). You all know how much we HATE SJP!
This person had watched our course, had a shock with our negative reviews of SJP and wanted to know what to do. They had £1.4m invested in their pension and an exit fee of 4%. Should they cut their losses and get out of the active funds in SJP, paying the 4% fee? That is a £56,000 fee just to leave SJP! Can you see why we hate SJP? This shit should be illegal. Now this is a big decision. This is a HUGE decision that can affect the course of your financial future and we felt the very real weight of responsibility helping the incredible human in front of us. So far this year, 6,540 of you have tuned in to RFS each week to work on your finances. You are making life-changing decisions based on our content. We are super confident in our content, after all we have backed this approach with all our own money as well. We have our entire investments in the same index funds we talk about on the course. We can't help being aware of our responsibility to you. We don't give advice. We never have and never will, but we do explain pensions, index investing and our approach and people make decisions in their own lives based on that. As the years of running the course have passed and more people are attending, we feel an increasing pressure and responsibility to look after you, our readers and viewers. We aren't some scam artist putting out get rich quick schemes on TikTok. We genuinely want to help you build a bright financial future. The mission
We have been thinking a lot lately about our mission inspired by the course. How we can help people and make a difference in the world. We want .......
We have big plans and a huge amount of things we want to do. See the latest RFS Update for more. Desire to grow
There are 60 million people in the UK and most of them are in a pickle with their finances. In 4 years we have managed to help 12,000+ people. We have barely scratched the surface!
Then you start to think of the rest of the world. There are so many people that struggle with money, can barely survive on what they have and need help. We want to reach as many people as possible. Good financial education should be free for all. They don't teach you this stuff at school. If your parents don't know anything about it then you are kind of screwed! Where are you going to learn? Money is the only game we ALL have to play. You don't get a choice if you live in a capitalist society which most of us do. The world operates on money, you need to earn it to get somewhere to sleep, food and other resources. You need to manage it so you have enough to live on. With auto-enrolment forcing us all to save into pensions (rightly so, we must look after ourselves in retirement) we are now all investors. If you don't develop your money and finance skills you are going to get left behind. 9 out of 10 young people aren't saving enough for retirement. We have millions heading towards poverty in retirement. Like lemmings heading off a financial cliff. There is so much work to do and we want to reach and support as many people as possible Join the Rebel Alliance
It is time to form a board to help us shape the future of RFS, stay on track and help more people. We know we can't do this all ourselves and we need people to help us. In fact we might be starting to get in the way and holding things back.
We want to form a small board of 4-6 people that will meet with us once every 2 months and help us work on the direction of RFS and the mission. The purpose is to:
What it entails
Maybe you have reached Financial Independence like we have and want to give back? Maybe you are on the journey and are excited to help others? Maybe you worked in the finance industry and want to help change it?
Whatever the reason it doesn't matter. We would love your support. What we are asking for is:
That is the minimum. There are always opportunities to do more, but that is what we really need. Some passionate people who are willing to challenge us, push us and help us grow. Remuneration
Unfortunately there is no remuneration for this project. At the moment we aren't even a not-for-profit, we are a loss making endeavour! This is one of the things that has to change.
We just wanted to be clear it is a voluntary position but it would look cool on your LinkedIn profile! We like to think that you would get a huge amount out of the project (just not cash!). You can add it to your LinkedIn Profile, CV. We get to work on a project that truly makes an impact together and you will get to shape the future of RFS with us. We asked Jeremy Hunt to be in the Rebel Alliance
Alan emailed Jeremy Hunt this morning and asked him if wanted to be an RFS board member. I am pretty sure he will say no but you never know! I am going to message Martin Lewis and Vanguard too as it would be cool to have a mix of people in finance, attendees from RFS and people who are FI already on the board. It would be AMAZING to have a real diverse mix of people all coming together to work on the mission to help people with their money!
Apply to be on the board
If you have made it this far through the article, nice work! If we have piqued your interest then maybe you would like to apply to be part of the Rebel Alliance. A Rebel Finance School Board member. If so then fill out this little google form and let us know. We would be honoured to hear from you.
The future of RFS
Katie and I are committed to building something amazing that helps people around the world to get on top of their finances. It will ALWAYS be free for people.
Thanks for reading our article. Thank you for supporting us. Please share this page with anyone you think would be interested or share it on your LinkedIn or Facebook. We would really appreciate that. Stay Rebellious Alan and Katie |