The Tutor Podcast

About The Tutor Podcast

The Tutor Podcast the weekly show that’s all about the business of helping people. If you’re a tutor, a teacher or a coach, join your host Neil Cowmeadow for news, tips and insights to help you Start, Grow and Love your tutoring business. Plain English, no buzzwords and no BS. So, if you want to make more money - and make more of a difference - The Tutor Podcast will be with you, every step of the way.

Publisher

Neil Cowmeadow

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

8 Apr 2018

Latest episode

18 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

439 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   18 Oct 2026

   A Matter of Great Interest

   Hi, it's Neil Cowmeadow here with episode 448 of the Tutor Podcast, the Monday morning shot of over-caffeinated uncommon sense for anyone who wants to start, grow, and love their own tutoring and coaching business the same way as mine. My aim is to bring you the ideas that have helped me in my business journey and life, as a teacher, property investor, mentor, and parent (even in a no-nonsense no-BS kind of way), in the hope that it helps you to ave as much fun at work and in life as I do. I don't have all the answers and nobody does. Maybe you got a some better answers that would be helpful to myself and to others. Again it's info@neilcowmeadow.com or @TutorPodcast on X, formerly known as Twitter. If you're good with all that, well okay, let's crack on with today – And we're following up from last episode, 447 - when we spoke about the fear of money and some ideas around it. In episode 447 I promised to go through some fundamental ideas about money which have been helpful to me over the years. So Let's have a look at one of the fundamental ideas in business and personal finance that people are terrified of: credit. Many of us, myself included, grew up in environments and families and social groups where credit was seen as a bad thing, where you were encouraged never to be a borrower. If that sounds familiar to you, you're not alone. Not taking on a bunch of expensive debt is often a good thing but sometimes it can be a missed opportunity. Fundamentally we all need to understand the difference between good debt and bad debt because they are very different animals. Let's take a look at bad debt first because that's the one that we were really being warned against I think. Bad debt is the loan or advance of cash that you take in order to buy something that has no greater return than the value of the debt you took out. This might be something as daft as borrowing a ton of money to go on a holiday, or for designer clothing, or an expensive car, because you think it gives you some kind of social status. The problem is that the initial cost of the item is just the beginning. When we buy things on long credit we have to pay additional charges to the person or organisation that loaned us the money. That's pretty bad in itself, come on, but a lot of times we'll buy items which depreciate in value. At the same time we're paying extra just to own that depreciating asset. Just suppose you go and spend a couple of thousand pounds on a bunch of new clothes for yourself. Maybe they've got the right labels on and are all the rage. By the way, the instant you put them in the bag and take them out of the shop, they're worth very little because they're now secondhand. The same thing applies if you buy a new car. The instant you put the key in and drive it off the forecourt, the value of that vehicle falls significantly. You will feel good for the first week or two whilst you have a brand-new car but that brand-new car is now only worth a percentage of the sticker price on the forecourt. If you bought at that sticker price on credit, the amount you owe for that now-depreciated vehicle is much higher than the sticker price. Congratulations. In the time it took you to put the key into the car and drive it off the forecourt, you may have lost as much as 20% of the sticker price! Certain electric vehicles seem to be particularly prone to even higher rates of depreciation – there are some horror stories out there - but the average annual rate of depreciation for a typical electric car runs at about 20%, which is a few percent higher than that for an internal combustion engine vehicle. Do you opt for an electric, petrol, or diesel car? The new car carries a premium cost and if you're buying it on credit, that premium cost is even greater than the burden of depreciation, Because you're going to be paying it off for the next few years, And the cost of that time is paid for in money. The same story applies if you're using your credit cards or a personal loan to buy Depreciating or wasting assets. If you must buy such things and you can do it legitimately, buy it through the business. For me an example of a wasting asset is a guitar, but that's a tool for the teaching business, isn't it? To put it in a nutshell, bad debt is debt that costs you more than the value of the thing the debt is paying for. That's the dark side of debt. We'd better have a look at the bright side now. This is the concept of good debt, which I needed to have explained to me a long time ago by my then boss, Mark, who is an absolute business genius. Good debt is money that costs less to borrow than the value of something it buys. Simple but I never really thought of it that way. I was still saddled with the idea that all debt was bad and I should avoid it at all costs. Let's say that you have a fantastic opportunity to acquire business premises for what you do. The impact on the business is all positive. You can teach more in that environment because it's not working out of home. When you're not working in there you can rent the room by the hour to other teachers and tutors. The problem is you don't have the money to acquire those premises so you will have to borrow the money. Borrowing the money for those premises can be very good, because if the premises generate more money than the cost of taking out the loan, you’re quids-in. By taking out the loan you acquire an asset which pays for itself and gives you a profit on top. This is a good example of how good credit works. In my property businesses: I use borrowed money where I can to fund deposits, then I leverage that borrowed money again using mortgages For the balance of the purchase cost. If I am creative enough. I can acquire properties with little or none of my own money. Provided the rental property produces more revenue than I need to service those debt obligations I'm making money out of thin air. These days I'm not afraid of using credit - Provided it is good credit and not the bad kind. It's very, very important to understand the difference between those two things. One will make you wealthy. One will eat you alive. Here's a quick tip about credit in general. It is called the Rule of 72 and it's a quick and dirty way of calculating how fast your money will double or halve in value (depending on whether you're making money by or paying interest to a lender). All you have to do is divide the number 72 by whatever interest rate you're earning or paying. This will give you a good approximation of the number of years it will take to either double your investment principal or halve the value of a depreciating asset. Let’s say you have an investment which returns 5% per year. Divide 72 by 5 and you come out with a number just over 14. That means it will take just over 14 years to double your initial investment. If you could make it 7%, it’ll take around 10 years to double your initial investment, and so on. Likewise, if that new car depreciates at 20% per year it will be worthless in around three and a half years – at least on paper. In practice there is always a floor: the scrap value of the metal itself. That’s the big difference between good and bad credit. The financial difference is more profound, because it is a spread: the difference between the value of an appreciating asset (say, a property) which makes you money and a depreciating asset (say, a car). The good credit funded positive asset might make you 10K per year, the depreciating car, watch, iPhone or gadget might be costing you thousands of pounds per year as its value falls – lets say the car depreciates 1oK this year. The 10K positive and the 10K negative are a combined spread of 20K: both outcomes are built on credit: which one would you like? We're going to wrap it up there because I've got things to do, people to see, and I know you do too. So I'm always trying to keep this brief. If you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. Feel free to send any questions or feedback to info@neilcowmeadow.com. Leave me a message on X where I am @TutorPodcast, and all being well, I'll see you in the next show. I hope this has been useful to you. Till next time, stay healthy, stay useful. Remember that you're always loved and you're never alone. Have a fabulous day.

2. 

   11 Oct 2026

   What To Do If Money Scares You

   Hi, it's Neil Cowmeadow here with episode 447 of the Tutor Podcast, the Monday morning shot of over-caffeinated uncommon sense for anyone who wants to start, grow, and love their own tutoring and coaching business the same way as mine. My aim is to bring you the ideas that have helped me in my business journey and life, as a teacher, property investor, mentor, and parent (even in a no-nonsense no-BS kind of way), in the hope that it helps you to ave as much fun at work and in life as I do. Although I'm here to share, I'm also here to listen. If you have any ideas that you think might be of interest on the show, or any questions, then get in touch. It's info@neilcowmeadow.com or you can find me on X, where I am @TutorPodcast. Maybe you can help me to learn something new, something different, something better maybe, and maybe I can help you and share what you learned. If you're good with all that, well okay, let's crack on with today – and we need to talk about money: Talk about the fear of money. This is based on a conversation I had with one of the listeners. He is an extremely smart wonderful person but he's afraid of money. So my excellent friend and all my excellent friends who listen in, this one's for you. I did a little bit of grubbing around to try to investigate fear of money and it turns out there are three principal ones: Chrometaphobia, which is an extreme fear of spending money. This makes misers out of successful people. If you fear to spend money and use money as a tool, the tool controls you. Peniaphobia, which is a persistent irrational fear of poverty. A long time ago this would have been a completely rational fear since there was no safety net of state benefits for anyone. A hundred or so years ago, back in the day, society and your community would probably look after you so you didn't die of malnutrition or exposure. These days you have to work quite hard to be in absolute abject poverty. Plutophobia, which is an intense fear of wealth or success. This is possibly the most bizarre of these fears. If you have plutophobia, the intense fear of wealth or success, ask yourself: How is that ever going to help you to do well in life? You would have to be mental to believe that, wouldn't you? Who knew? I didn't even know there was such a thing as a fear of money but I've met lots of people who have peculiar relationships with money: from the tightwad who never wants to put his hand in his pocket to the guy who seems to make his money disappear as soon as it lands in his bank account, and all points in between. From people who save incredibly hard and spend nothing to people who spend everything and save nothing - We all know people like this, don't we? How you got the fear is something you can't really go back and do anything about. The chances are it will have come from parents, teachers, peers, or some experience along the way that fundamentally shifted your relationship with money. What I'm more interested in is developing a healthy and positive relationship with money, finance, and making things work better for yourself. First of all I think it's vitally important to understand that money is really just the counters in a game called life. It's completely made up. Money is a fiction that makes society run more smoothly than if we all had to carry around a pig under our arms to barter with. I think we all need to get over the idea that there's some inherent value in a particular piece of paper or plastic and that the numbers on the screen of your bank app mean absolutely jack shit. That's why banks can create money out of thin air on a bank screen and lend it to you, thus exerting vast amounts of power over you and your behavior whilst extracting additional value (interest on the loan) from you on something that they conjured out of thin air. That is fucking magic. I'm not here to tell you if that's right or wrong. What I am here to tell you to do is acknowledge the fact that it's just a game and you're playing the game. Stepping back from understanding the rules of the game will not make you a better player. It will make you a bigger loser. It's vitally important, and this is my big point for today, to realize that money isn't good and it isn't bad. It is, at its heart, completely neutral. What makes it good or bad is how you or I choose to use it. Like any tool, a knife can be used to kill or to perform life-saving surgery, to murder or to prepare dinner for your loved ones. The knife itself is morally neutral and so is money. I love the idea that money is an amplifier. It will allow you to do more of what you already do. If you're a charitable giver you'll probably give more if you have more money. If you're a dick you'll probably do bigger-scale dick things if you have more money to finance your dickery. This is the reason so many people who win lotteries or, back in the day, the football pools, would often go broke very quickly. Money doesn't do anything other than reveal who you really are. Speaking very personally I've been able to do a lot more good as I've done more in business and property. I've been able to help more people because I've had more money to do it with - Just like owning better tools and more tools has allowed me to do more interesting jobs. The money is just a store of value that can be deployed, or spent, or invested as you please. It is convenient and reduces friction in society, that's its job and it's very good at it. What money isn't is the end point. If money is the end point of everything you do, you have a serious problem. There is always more money. You can't have it all so you'll always be chasing something that cannot possibly be achieved. Frankly if you were to acquire all the money in Britain, for example, you'd find that the government would simply print a whole lot more. That new print of money would cause the buying power of the money you already had to fall in value. This is inflation and it's built into the system. In a real money system there would be no inflation and the currency would be stable. However governments successively have inflation targets, which function just like another stealth tax on your overtaxed earnings. So - If you're afraid of spending your cash or investing your cash - just remember that you should be more afraid of leaving it in the bank earning very low returns (because its buying power is being systematically eroded by inflation, completely by design). And as far as your phobias go, start exposing yourself to the things you're afraid of. Initially this will be uncomfortable but that discomfort will diminish over time given exposure. Growing up in my family, we didn't really talk about money, so My brothers and I left school and went into the world of work with very little understanding of money. Pretty much no idea of saving, and it took years and years to get past that and to think in terms of saving, investment, then later into business and entrepreneurship. I've always tried to teach Alex, my son, how money works and he's starting to get it. Money is not difficult but the rules are hidden in order to keep you poor and compliant. What I want you to think about today is breaking away from your servitude to money and the slavery of debt and taking control of your money so it works for you instead of for the banks and the government. This is your wake-up call. The future starts now and it's looking bright.

3. 

   4 Oct 2026

   Happy Birthday, Property Me

   Hi, it's Neil Cowmeadow here with episode 446 of the Tutor Podcast, the Monday morning shot of over-caffeinated uncommon sense for anyone who wants to start, grow, and love their own tutoring and coaching business the same way as mine. My aim is to bring you the ideas that have helped me in my business journey and life, as a teacher, property investor, mentor, and parent (even in a no-nonsense no-BS kind of way), in the hope that it helps you to have as much fun at work and in life as I do. Although I'm here to share, I'm also here to listen. If you have any ideas that you think might be of interest on the show, or any questions, then get in touch. It's info@neilcowmeadow.com or you can find me on X, where I am @TutorPodcast. Maybe you can help me to learn something new, something different, something better maybe, and maybe I can help you and share what you learned. I don't have all the answers and nobody does. Maybe you got a some better answers that would be helpful to myself and to others. Again it's info@neilcowmeadow.com or @TutorPodcast on X, formerly known as Twitter. If you're good with all that, well okay, let's crack on with today. It's crept up on me lately that this is actually a very special week. It's the last day of September as I'm recording this, which means that tomorrow (Thursday) it's actually my 10th anniversary of being a property investor. That's 10 years of buying residential properties in the background of running my teaching business.That particular journey started after I had a big cycling accident in Spain and realized just how close I was to being in deep financial trouble – the realisation that I (and perhaps you, too) might be one accident or illness away from going broke has driven me to build an investment portfolio and given me a significant degree of financial freedom. This is not a bragfest – frankly, if I can build something significant in the background of my teaching business, then anyone can – including you. I share this with you to: Inspire you, because I am proof of what is possible for you, and Because there’s a point that’s worth sharing – especially if you are driven and prone to self-neglect, as I am: Celebrate the Wins! You know how it goes – you’re in it every day, working hard to make something happen, build something, help someone – no matter what it takes, you’ll do it. You’ll do more for anyone else than you’ll do for yourself – just like I will. You set a goal, reach it and screech right past without stopping, because you’ve already got your next goal in the crosshairs and you have a ridiculous tendency toward tunnel vision. Sound familiar, or is it just me? It’s as though you’ve just completed a marathon and breezed straight past the finish line without bothering to collect your medal or souvenir tee-shirt, so focused are you on the next marathon on your calendar. Understandable – perhaps even laudable – but I’ve come to believe we miss something valuable: reinforcement and confirmation of the victory and the triumph of the struggle. We – as the old saying goes – don’t pause to smell the roses, to savour the sweet smell of success: no, we just ring the bell and call out “next!” as we re-roll our sleeves and pitch in to the next project, and the next… I’ve been aware of this trait for years – my wonderful ex-fiance and friend more or less dragged me kicking and screaming to accept my degree after years of work around my job and home renovation project, my businesses and being dad to Alex… I’m grateful to her for strong-arming me to the ceremony, because it turned out to be a cherished memory that we would never have made. It was a pretty big win. So last weekend I sat down to reflect on the first ten years in property, on the achievements, pitfalls, lessons learned, promises kept and friends made along the way. The portfolio has grown to something significant and is still growing, and I’m almost proud to have gotten this far. But more than the financial and property parts of that business that I have grown – I realised that the business has also grown me in return. A wise man – I think it was the great Jim Rohn - once pointed out that the greatest wins are not on a balance sheet or revenue statement: they are the person you become along the way. Man, he nailed it. So tomorrow morning I’m going to pause and celebrate the last ten years in property… and while I’m at it I might allow myself a smile and think about what I’ve managed to achieve in the last 27 years teaching guitar, collaborating on musical projects, writing books and songs, developing and refining new learning pathways to help my tribe, and so much more. Most of all I’ll be grateful that I tried, that I didn’t listen to the doubters and the inner voices who wanted me to stay who I was back then. So now it’s your turn: pause and think about your own wins in life and business… really pat yourself on the back and notice how you’ve grown and built in your own life. And most of all – remember to be grateful to yourself for believing in YOU and for you taking the chances that made all the difference to you and to those around you. You did great, didn’t you? We're going to wrap it up there because I've got things to do, people to see, and I know you do too. So I'm always trying to keep this brief. If you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. Feel free to send any questions or feedback to info@neilcowmeadow.com. Leave me a message on X where I am @TutorPodcast, and all being well, I'll see you in the next show. I hope this has been useful to you. Till next time, stay healthy, stay useful. Remember that you're always loved and you're never alone. Have a fabulous day.

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Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

1,781

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.5 / 5

10 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 65 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

67

Social presence

0

YouTube

68

Engagement

90