Ten minutes with the founders of Nugget Savings
Set up in 2023, Nugget Savings originally started as a TikTok page to provide hacks, tips and tricks to help parents and parents-to-be improve their financial wellbeing and help them prepare for having a baby. What initially started as a passion project has since grown into a thriving business in the form of an online platform offering a multitude of resources for parents to financially prepare for having a baby.
Tell us about your journey before founding Nugget Savings.
Katie: Upon having my first baby, I was self-employed and running my own business. I found that Statutory Maternity Pay was so low that I couldn’t afford to take a proper maternity leave and as a result, I worked the entire time. I was struck by how blindsided fellow parents felt by the financial implications of maternity leave, and for most, it’s not considered until planning for the imminent arrival of a baby. If there was better information about financial planning resources available, parents would feel much more confident about their parental leave and would be able to enjoy those first, precious moments of becoming a parent, not stressing about finances.
Harriet: When I became self-employed, I researched what maternity leave could look like for me and realised there was no clarity or guidance about how to plan for having a baby, or what support was available, not just for the self-employed but for everyone approaching this milestone.
What do you feel are the biggest challenges parents are facing at the moment?
With the cost-of-living crisis, high inflation, high interest rates, unaffordable mortgages and rents, as well as a childcare crisis and the rise of compulsory return-to-office mandates, parents are struggling like never before to make ends meet and find work that fits in with school runs and family life. It’s a trend we see all over the Western world, demonstrated by the falling birth rate globally.
We hear from people all the time that they want children, or want siblings for their existing children, but simply can’t make the numbers work. The motherhood penalty is real, with 26% of women falling into debt over their maternity leave and 54,000 women a year being forced to leave the workforce as a result of pregnancy and maternity discrimination.
The thing is - having a child is a time-limited prospect. So we can’t just hang around to wait for the system to improve.
That’s why we created Nugget. We know the system is broken and unfair - so we show you ways to make the most of it and ensure you are getting everything you are entitled to, as well as having an awareness of your employment rights.
How do you split your roles?
Katie: My role covers everything we do on the sales and marketing front. So my day-to-day could involve coming up with new ideas for content for our blogs and socials to grab our audience's attention and build our community. Analysing our sales data and identifying where these sales are coming from. If we’re launching a new product, my focus is on how to maximise such launches across our platforms. I also engage with our community to learn what they want from our platform and Harriet and I will look at the data to help us introduce new products and features. But this is just a snippet of a typical day and being a founder involves wearing many hats, from IT, to finance, it’s very varied!
Harriet: My role is more focused on the operations and product side of the business. So a typical day for me might focus on analysing data from our community and sales to see what new products we can introduce, how current products are performing, what new features we can add to benefit our community or streamline the user experience, as well as building partnerships with brands and experts for our masterclasses - but as Katie said, this is just a snippet as being a founder is so varied.
What would your top tips be for parents looking to improve their finances in 2025?
Be aware of your parental leave policy. It can come as a shock to some people when they check what they are entitled to. The statutory rate of maternity pay is 90% of your average weekly wage for 6 weeks, and then £184.03 per week for 33 weeks after that. If you are looking to take a whole year, the last 3 months will be unpaid. Most people can’t afford to live off £184.03 a week, so financial planning is key. Taking a look at your finances and working out how much you need to save for this period is crucial. We believe spreadsheets can save lives (and arguments!) and we have a great parental leave planner which has all the formulas plugged in already so you can plan your finances over that period with your partner.
Once you know what your work policy is - we’d like parents to know that you can negotiate your parental leave! It does require you to be persuasive and to do a little research but it can be done. We hosted a masterclass on this exact topic last year and have had community members come to us with incredible success stories, boosting their finances on maternity leave by thousands of pounds, just from using our advice.
If you’re planning to have a baby, use our NuggBase in order to see which companies have the best parental leave policies. It’s the UK’s biggest database of parental leave policies with over 900+ on there, and it can be used for benchmarking your employer's current offering. Is it competitive? Are other companies in your industry offering better? Data is key for strengthening your argument when negotiating your parental leave.