Finance expert Dan Hatfield on getting clever with cash, his rise to fame and working alongside the new presenting team on This Morning
Dan Hatfield is a man on a mission. As the resident money-making expert on This Morning his practical, no-nonsense advice has made him a favourite among viewers, especially in what, for many, are financially uncertain times.
But Dan, who has just released a new book, Money Maker – a distillation of a quarter of a century of knowledge about how to save and make cash – is focused on taking his small-screen expertise and using it to tackle a bigger picture.
“I want to help people transform themselves from financially surviving to financially thriving,” explains Dan. “I constantly get emails from people asking for my advice – and I think we’re going to have another rough 12 to 18 months ahead of us as a country. I can’t sit by and not do something.”
He admits that debt is “complicated”. “People are worried. Worried about paying mortgages, about the constant shock around how much everything is, worried about making food choices based on their income. “But there are ways we can tackle the situation. The first is to save money and the second is to make it. I think people are at the end of their tether saving-wise so we have to take it upon ourselves to grab the bull by the horns, look at the world around us and get those extra pounds in.”
A third-generation pawnbroker, 41-year-old Dan says, “We can all get overwhelmed by the macro, by the big sense
of how to earn money but we need to look at the world around us first. Look at the things you own, the skills you have, the hobbies you enjoy, the potential side hustles you can identify – and monetise them. It’s thinking small to earn big.”
A native of Sheffield, Dan, who shares homes in London and the Peak District with his TV executive producer husband, Joff Powell, reckons that as a nation we have around £3,000 worth of items in our houses that could be converted into cash.
And while clothes, tech and furniture might be obvious products to sell there are less obvious ones too – such as toilet roll innards. “There’s a demand for them by people who use them in craft. You can sell them on eBay.”
Dan also suggests renting out our possessions, from driveways to laptops, bikes and even garden equipment. “You have worked to buy goods – why not make them work for you? A wedding dress can bring in anything from £50 to £200 a day. Your drive might make you £200 a month. The days of a fast, disposable society are on the wane and renting goods plays into that.”
Dan’s quest to kick-start a financial revolution may have its basis in his own childhood.
His family wasn’t wealthy and his mum Heleana would do “anything and everything” to make ends meet, he recalls. “I remember her hosting Tupperware parties and then she worked for Avon. I was eight or nine years old and my mum would get me up at the crack of dawn to go to the car boot sales. We’d come back having decluttered the house, but most importantly we’d earned a fistful of pounds.”
He went to work in the family business, but then he was approached to take part in Channel 4 ’s Posh Pawnbrokers. That led to ITV ’s Million Pound Pawn and from there the This Morning sofa.
It could have all been very different, though. “I was going to cancel taking part in Posh Pawnbrokers. I couldn’t face it. But I got my weeks wrong so the camera crew turned up. If I wasn’t so disorganised I wouldn’t be here now, I wouldn’t have written a book and I wouldn’t be married — I met my husband through my work in TV.”
Dan is still involved in the family business – and he says you never know what each day will bring. He has been offered a cast of what purported to be Justin Bieber ’s penis, as well as Fabergé eggs and even a sample of the bath water in which Whitney Houston lost her life.
It’s his role on This Morning though where he knows he can make a big difference and he’s relishing working with new presenters Cat Deeley and Ben Shephard. “I think they are going to breathe a breath of fresh air into the programme. We have the nicest people in TV at the helm,” he smiles. For now he’s focused on helping the nation – and he has one big piece of advice. “Make the time to make money, because we’ve all got it within us. There are too many dark clouds around for us to simply dwell on them. We’ve just got to get out there and crack on.”
Money Maker: Unlock Your Money-Making Potential by Dan Hatfield is available now from Amazon and all good bookshops