Iona Bain: Solo Finance, Living Alone & The 'Single Supplement'

Iona Bain is a personal finance expert who appears regularly on BBC Morning Live and writes a weekly column for the i Paper. She’s written two books, her second is Own It – a millennial guide to investing. On a personal level, she’s also recently made the big step of buying her first flat as a solo   buyer – a process she described to me in an email as a ‘learning curve’. In this episode, we discuss questions around solo finance – including the cost of living alone and the dreaded ‘single’ supplement’ – which, as many of you will know, is the additional cost often associated with doing things solo, from getting a hotel room to buying food in the supermarket. So many of you had specific questions you wanted me to ask Iona, so in the second half of this episode I’ll be bringing out some crowd-sourced audience questions.  We discuss, among other things: How Iona went from a musician who stored cash from gigs in a piggy bank, to a leading money expert.Iona's journey to buying her own place alone (and why she's transparent about having had help)Why our relationship with money is about more than just numbers – there's emotion involved, tooThe Single Supplement and how to navigate itHow learning to spend time alone can help us not only save, but also spend on what matters to us You can order Iona Bain's latest book, Own It, now from Bookshop.org.  You can also order my book, Alonement: How To Be Alone and Absolutely Own It, which is based on this very podcast, now from Amazon, Waterstones and Bookshop.org. Thank you so much to Flash Pack for sponsoring this season of the podcast. Flash Pack is a travel company that offers boutique group adventures for solo travellers in their 30s and 40s. Visit flashpack.com/alonement to learn more and quote ALONEMENT at check-out for £100 off your first trip. Twitter:*  @ChezSpecter@IonaYoungMoney*Instagram: *@ChezSpecter@IonaBain*Contact: [email protected] With a one-off payment of £5, you can listen to the Alonement podcast ad-free. https://plus.acast.com/s/alonement. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.