Still, when I joined Lewis for his meeting about the email, he was cautious. Lewis applies that same care to his campaigns and public pronouncements. He has based his career on just about the last thing we all have in common: the wish to save money. And he tends not to weigh in on the most contentious issues of the day, for fear of dividing opinion and undermining his sway.
He believes he can have the biggest impact on society by changing our relationship to money — but it has become harder for him to stay out of politics altogether. With his fiery rhetoric, his efforts to defend the little guy against vested interests, Lewis may look like a populist.
But, at heart, he has a technocratic temperament: he identifies specific problems, and tries to solve them with tweaks. Lewis is, in short, a centrist — perhaps the only truly popular centrist in Britain. Instead of seeking structural change, his formula combines educating the public with campaigning for small adjustments to the system.
But at a time of growing inequality, with politicians unwilling or unable to hold corporations to account, is this enough? But now, a decade after the financial crisis, it feels particularly urgent.
You need to be prudent, but how? Since the deregulation and privatisations of the s, we have had to make more and more financial decisions, and they have become dizzyingly complex. There are so many options: Britain has more than banks, dozens of energy companies. Then there are all the credit cards, broadband providers, mobile networks.
You know that if make the wrong choice you will get ripped off. What has made Lewis so popular is that he offers a concrete response to this uncertainty. His work holds out the hope that you can take control of your finances and your life. He wants to help people get more from the money they have, and reduce the stress that money can cause.
In this respect, Lewis is less like a doctor, doling out pills for the patient to swallow, than a personal trainer: he promises to make you stronger through your own hard work. And no matter how little you understand at first, you can still judge his advice for yourself by its effect on your bank balance.
This is what has saved Lewis from the fate of so many experts, who incur resentment by appearing to lord their expertise over everyone else. Instead of just telling you what to do, Lewis makes you feel as if you, too, can become a money-saving expert.
When Lewis was in charge of Money Saving Expert, he worked up to 90 hours a week. Since selling the company, he has continued to play an important role, as executive chairman, and pictures of him wearing a confident expression appear all over the website like a talisman against profligacy.
But even though he has cut down, to 50 or 60 hours, his schedule still appears exhausting in its variety and intensity. Rather than prioritising a particular audience, he addresses whoever he can, modulating his message each time like a shrewd ambassador for financial prudence.
What matters to him is getting the word out. As he waited to go on set, he asked a member of the crew if she watched Love Island. When his turn on This Morning came, he took questions about student finance from callers, staring intensely at the camera as he listened. As usual, he spoke in rapidfire bursts, slowing down theatrically for emphasis.
The segment was introduced with the song Bills, by the American singer LunchMoney Lewis, and as it played Lewis air drummed, bobbing his head.
It was a longer slot than This Morning, with a more leisurely pace; the callers seemed canny, and Lewis responded with a level of detail he tends to avoid on TV.
That afternoon, he attended a meeting at the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute , a charity that he founded in , to carry out research and campaigns on the connection between mental illness and financial problems. The next day, Lewis met with Matt Hancock, who was then the culture secretary. It was a few weeks after Lewis had announced that he was suing Facebook for defamation, over fake adverts that featured his name and image, and the pair discussed online ads and scams.
That evening, Lewis started tweeting about Love Island. He was once a finalist in a competition for young Jewish stand-up comedians. Two days later, he wrote a comment piece for the Financial Times, proposing reforms to student finance. Lewis, who has a knack for remembering numbers, is happy to play the role of a financial savant in his TV appearances. But his displays of knowledge are mostly for show: their purpose is not so much to convey information as to demonstrate his mastery of the material, his fitness to instruct.
His actual advice, on the other hand, is often surprisingly simple. Before buying anything, you ask yourself two questions. Can I afford it? The year-old attended the London School of Economics, where he read government and law, and Cardiff University, where he studied broadcast journalism, before taking a job at a financial communications consultancy. In February , he founded his popular MoneySavingExpert. His current co-presenter on the programme is Angelica Bell.
The source of the majority of his wealth is his MSE website, which he sold in to the Moneysupermarket. As part payment for MSE, Martin received Money Saving Expert has won a variety of different awards, with The Times claiming the webpage is one of "ten that stun with sheer insight or inspired rich media".
After launching his successful site, Martin was invited to act as an expert on a wide variety of different telly programmes. Martin has had a long career in journalism, television and radio. He graduated from Cardiff University for Journalism and studied broadcast journalism after initially reading government and law at the London School of Economics.
However, after poor viewing figures, the main backer of the channel pulled their support and left almost 51 staff, including Martin, without a job. Martin Lewis advises on the bank branches to switch to. Martin Lewis: Money Saving Expert has amassed a small fortune - how much is his net worth? Lower costs this Christmas with these money-saving tips.
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