We Walked 79 Miles in 72 Hours for Charity. My Knees Learned What 15 Years of Investing Taught Me.
Last week I walked 79 miles around the coastal path of the Isle of Wight alongside 9 other NHS colleagues. In under 72 hours. Over 160,000 steps. Raising money for Naomi's House and Jack's Place — a children's hospice looking after young people with life-limiting conditions, and the families walking alongside them.
I went in as a complete amateur. No ultra-walking background, no seasoned trail experience.
By the end, my legs had learned things my head already knew from fifteen years of managing money on an NHS salary. The hike didn't teach me anything new about finance. It just made the lessons impossible to ignore.
Here are the five that stuck.
1. The Plan will change. The Goal never does.
Day 1, coastal erosion had taken out entire sections of the path. We'd get diverted inland for a couple of kilometres, then have to walk that same distance back out just to re-join the coast. What was published as a 71–72 mile route became closer to 80 miles by the time we finished. None of it was calculable in advance. None of it was avoidable.
I've had the same experience with my investing journey— just stretched over 16 years instead of 3 days.
I started trading precious metals. Gold, silver, palladium. Then moved into momentum-driven hot stock trading. Then Benjamin Graham-style "cigar butt" deep value investing — picking up cheap, unloved companies for one last puff of value. I then found my true calling in a Buffett and Terry Smith-style quality-compounding approach to stock picking, my ‘Mecca’. But my biggest wealth actually came from funnelling the majority of my money into cheap, broad market index funds — and focusing on tax efficiency, money psychology, and increasing my earnings so I had more to pour into those investment vehicles.
Five completely different strategies. Three sets of mistakes, one that remains a deep philosophy, one that create generational wealth. If you'd shown me my current portfolio approach when I started, I wouldn't have recognised it.
But the goal never moved. Financial independence. Control over my own time. The ability to keep giving my skills to the NHS because I choose to, not because I have to.
The takeaway: your plan is allowed to be wrong. It's allowed to evolve as you learn — better platforms, better tax wrappers, a strategy that finally clicks after the last three didn't. What isn't allowed to move is the destination. If you're chasing the plan instead of the goal, every diversion feels like a failure. If you're chasing the goal, a diversion is just a diversion, it’s just part of the journey.
2. Every finish line the beginning of the next challenge. That's not pessimism — that's adulthood.
We delayed lunch on day one to reach a bigger village before dark. Four hours of continuous ascent later, thinking we'd earned flat ground, we were greeted by a 120-step wooden staircase.
I'm not going to dress that moment up. It was demoralising. Dehumanising, honestly. I went to some deep park places in my mind, lol😅. Like the trail had shrunk you down to nothing and was just going to keep throwing things at you until you broke.
I know that feeling from home, too.
Before I'd built a proper emergency fund — one with actual tiers, not just a vague "some savings" — our family SUV needed a dent fixed during a routine service. While that was on the card, we found out all four tyres needed replacing. Over £280 each. You do the math for 4 wheels. While I was still working that off against next month's salary, a roof tile came through our conservatory window in a storm. Long story short: Full roof repair. Full conservatory refurb. Over £30,000.
Problems don't queue politely and wait for you to be ready. The moment you've cleared one, the next one is already walking towards you.
The takeaway: stop expecting a version of your life where the problems stop. They don't. What changes is your capacity to absorb them without it wrecking you — which is the entire argument for building a tiered emergency fund before you think you need one, not after the roof falls in.
Learn how to build your Emergency 'Sleep-Well' fund 👇
3. Information isn't preparation. Experience is.
We had six people on that walk — Matt, Davina, Scott, Angus, Andy, Jane — with a combined eighteen-plus years of doing challenges like this. I'd read the blogs. Watched the videos. Thought I was ready.
I wasn't aware you're meant to preload painkillers before the pain starts, not once you're already struggling. I was aware blister kit existed — I wasn't aware you treat the hot spot the second you feel it, not once it's already a blister. I'd never had knee pain in my life. They had tape and support ready strapped on before the challenge started anyway, not because they'd suffered it, but because they knew someone eventually would.
That's the entire case for why I built Medical Finance Academy the way I did.
A financial advisor takes your money, charges you a fee, and takes a bite out of your compounding for the rest of your life — often while giving you generic advice that doesn't account for poor money psychology, NHS pay scales, pension quirks, or shift-pattern cash flow. You stay dependent on them forever.
What I try to give people instead is the equivalent of Matt taping a knee that hasn't hurt yet. Not just facts you could Google. A framework, built from someone who's actually walked the NHS financial path, that tells you to zoom out your lenses and understand what's coming before it arrives — so you're not just coping between savings and debt while losing years of compound growth and giving away tax you didn't need to.
The takeaway: you can get information anywhere. What you can't get from a blog post is someone who's already made the mistake, telling you to prepare for it before you've felt the pain. That's the difference between reacting to your finances and taking control of them.
Download your FREE Complete NHS Accounts Framework 👇
4. Integrity is what you do when nobody's counting the miles.
Day 3, restarting after the extra diversions, some of us — myself included — half-joked about starting from the edge of the village due to the extra unaccounted miles from diversions. Strictly by the numbers, we'd already overshot the target distance. Nobody would have known.
We didn't do it. Every one of us reminded each other to walk every step, every mile. And the finish felt sweeter precisely because we knew, quietly, that we hadn't cheated ourselves.
The NHS version of that shortcut doesn't look like skipping a mile marker. It looks like exhaustion.
After a long run of shifts, emotional and mental fatigue tips a lot of us into decisions we wouldn't make well-rested:
The "cheeky" takeaway because cooking feels impossible tonight
Overspending on your kids because you feel guilty for the hours you're not there
Treating yourself because you feel you've earned it
Buying yourself a quick hit of relief because it's easier than processing how the shift actually felt
None of these are shameful on their own, and honestly, you deserve to enjoy money. But they compound. Quietly, month on month, the same way missed diversions add miles you don't notice until you add them up.
The takeaway: strip the shame out of it first — you're not weak for wanting comfort after a brutal shift. But go back through your spending honestly. Subscriptions you forgot you had. Impulse buys that were really about the shift, not the item. Separate what's genuinely essential to a good quality of life from what's a shortcut you're taking because nobody's watching. Integrity with money is a private decision, made repeatedly, with no one checking the mile count.
5. Most of it is temporary. Very little of it actually lasts.
On day one, I know, a descent left me with knee pain I'd never experienced before — bad enough that, in that hour, I genuinely doubted I'd finish. Then the terrain shifted to ascent instead of descent. The pain disappeared. I walked another 40 miles without it returning.
I've learned not to read that as "the pain went away, relief."
I read it as: something else was always going to take its place. That's not bleak. It's just the ride.
Most of the dead ends in an NHS career — career setbacks, rota disasters, a financial gut-punch — are the same. Painful in the moment, rarely permanent. The mistake is fixating on the crisis in front of you as if it's the whole story, instead of staying anchored to where you're actually trying to go.
Nikki and I used to argue about money. Properly argue — the kind that comes from two people looking at the same bank balance and seeing two different problems. It wasn't until I built an actual framework — not just a coping mechanism, a system — that it stopped. Our quality of life didn't just improve financially. The arguments stopped, because the stress that was underneath them stopped.
The takeaway: be honest with yourself about what's happening, be agile enough to adapt, and build the financial foundation before the crisis, not during it. The whole point of a framework isn't to eliminate every problem — it's so that when the next one arrives, you're not lying awake over it. You're free to spend that headspace on your career, your skills, and your family instead.
Download your FREE Complete NHS Accounts Framework 👇
Ready to Start? Here's Your Next Step
You've just read the numbers. You know what starting early does. You know what waiting costs. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you're probably thinking — "okay, but where do I ACTUALLY begin?"
That's exactly where I come in.
One-to-One Investment Coaching — Built for NHS Professionals like you~
I've spent 15 years making every investing mistake you can possibly make.
I bought the wrong funds. I only invested in individual stocks. I panic-sold at the wrong time. I ignored tax efficiency for years and handed money to the government I didn't need to. I read over 80 investment books — from Warren Buffett to Nassim Taleb to Howard Marks to Morgan Housel — so I could filter out the noise and find what actually works for someone with a busy NHS career and a real life to live.
You get all of that. In a few focused sessions. Without any of the painful, expensive lessons.
Think about it this way.
Most people spend years making avoidable mistakes before they find their feet with investing. Wrong accounts. Wrong funds. Wrong timing. Each mistake costs real money — sometimes thousands of pounds.
My coaching compresses that entire learning curve. You skip the mistakes. You start right. You build faster.
And Here's the Part That Surprises Most People
This coaching effectively PAYS FOR ITSELF!
Within the first few months of working together, most clients unlock tax rebates and tax-efficient strategies they didn't even know existed — through their NHS pension, SIPP contributions, ISAs, and workplace expenses they were entitled to claim back but never did.
That money? It was always yours. You just didn't know how to claim it.
Add in the investment returns from starting sooner and starting smarter — and the coaching fee isn't a cost. It's an investment with one of the fastest returns you'll ever make.
Prefer to Learn at Your Own Pace? The MFA Money Toolkit
Not everyone wants — or can afford — one-to-one coaching right now, and that's fine. If you'd rather work through this yourself, in your own time, the MFA Money Toolkit gives you the same foundations in self-learning form: practical guides and calculators covering emergency funds, ISAs, and the accounts every NHS professional should know about — built to actually be used on a night shift break, not just read once and forgotten.
It costs a fraction of a coaching session, and you keep it for good.
Here's What I Want You to Do Right Now
Step 1 — Check your financial health in under 5 minutes
Before anything else, take the free Financial Health Score self-assessment. It gives you an honest snapshot of exactly where you stand with your money right now — budgeting, debt, savings, investing, and tax efficiency.
No judgment. Just clarity.
Step 2 — Choose your path
From here, it's your call: work with me directly, or grab the toolkit and go it alone.
Option A — Book a 1-to-1 coaching session
Curious what's covered first? Take a look at the course programme curriculum.
📧 Email: simon.wong@medicalfinanceacademy.com
📞 Phone/WhatsApp: +44 7923 069 623
Whatsapp: +44 7923 069 623
Option B — Grab the MFA Money Toolkit and learn at your own pace
P.S. The biggest regret I hear from NHS professionals I coach? "I wish I'd started this sooner." Let's make sure that's not you.
One conversation could be the financial turning point you look back on in ten years and think — "that's when everything changed."
The knowledge is here. The plan is here. The only thing missing is you.
Let's build your financial future — properly, this time.
Disclaimer
All content on this blog — including articles, guides, tools, and any other products — is written and produced by me personally, drawing on my own experience, research, and opinions. I created this blog for the greater good of my NHS colleagues, to support their careers and financial wellbeing. I'm not a financial advisor, and nothing here is produced by a firm, editorial team, or licensed professional on my behalf. I have no affiliation with, and accept no incentive from, any financial firm, company, or product that could influence or coerce me into producing promotional content — the views expressed here are my own and entirely independent.
This site exists for general financial education and entertainment purposes only. It does not constitute financial, investment, tax, legal, or any other form of professional advice, and nothing on it takes into account your individual objectives, financial situation, or needs. You should not rely on anything here to make a financial decision.
You remain solely responsible for your own decisions. Please do your own research, due diligence and independent learning before acting on anything mentioned or implied on this blog. Examples, case studies, and any figures used are purely illustrative of my own experience — they are not guaranteed and may not be replicated in your circumstances.
Investing and financial planning carry risk, and the value of any investment can go down as well as up. Before making any financial, investment, or tax decision, please seek personalised advice from a suitably qualified, regulated professional adviser.
Comments