Could the ‘admin night’ TikTok trend help you stay on top of your finances?

Having an accountability buddy can help you achieve your goals – and that doesn’t just apply for the gym, but it can help with your finances too.

That’s why there’s a growing trend for ‘admin nights’ on TikTok, where you get together with friends and tick off a bunch of things on your to-do list – particularly when it comes to your money.

“It’s a good way of making it more fun,” says Laura Suter, director of personal finance at AJ Bell. She says you’re “more likely to tackle” some of the more mundane tasks if you’re doing it with friends.

“Rather than sitting down at home and doing it on your own, you could go out for dinner and do it with a friend, or you could go to a bar, or have someone over and tackle some of the boring tasks together,” Suter adds.

According to Maike Currie, VP of personal finance at PensionBee, “You can use this fun night to make a big impact on your long-term wealth.” Currie says she’s done something similar over the years both with her partner, and before, when she lived in a house share: “This is something that happened naturally, because you have that shared collective wisdom, which is really useful. But now increasingly, as we grow older and we are more isolated and we’re working remotely, you’ve actually got to proactively get something like this put together.”

Suter similarly highlights the benefits of sharing wisdom with your friends. “Someone might have, for example, already started investing and be able to give you a bit of info on how they started. Someone else might be really good on the pension side of things… I think it’s bringing together that different knowledge, particularly if you have a bigger group of people. People might work in different jobs, and have different experiences from those jobs – I think that’s quite useful.”

And it’s not like you have to divulge every part of your finances if that’s not something you’re comfortable with. “Some people are much more private about money than others, but even if you’re not talking in pounds and pence figures, you could still talk,” says Suter.

“Among my friendship group, people have talked about what percentage they’re contributing to their pension at work, how much their employer is matching of that, and whether they could increase that. Even that gives you a barometer – if you realise that all your friends are paying in a higher percentage level, regardless of salary levels, that might be a good prompt for you to think, ‘Oh, I should look at that’.

“I don’t think having these admin nights means you have to be a completely open book about your finances. I still think you can get useful information and useful stuff done even without revealing all.”

So what tasks might you tackle on an admin night with friends? “One of the foundations of sorting out your finances is looking at a budget,” says Suter. “That doesn’t need to be a super comprehensive accounting for every penny that you spend, but a basic budget of how much money you have coming in each month, then how much you have going out in essentials, and where you’re spending your money elsewhere.

“That’s a really important foundational thing to understand, because it highlights how much debt you might have, or how much you’re paying towards that debt, it highlights how much money you have available to start saving or investing.

“But it probably doesn’t seem like the most exciting thing to sit down and work out, but it might be that a friend has a good tip on how they’ve done a budget, or can share a spreadsheet or an app that can help with it.”

Once you’ve got that down, you could look at your finances more broadly. Currie refers to the “five things to thrive”, AKA the five areas she suggests are worthwhile looking at when it comes to personal wealth. These are debt (“the quicker you can get on top of debt, the better”, she says – whether that’s “bad debt” like credit card debt, or “good debt” like your mortgage), having a rainy day fund (“setting that up through regular contributions, making sure you’ve got three to six months of income set aside”), protection (like life insurance or critical illness protection), pensions and investing.

These might seem like hefty tasks to take on, but you can always break them up into more manageable pieces. “So if we think about your pension, the first thing could be looking at: how much am I paying in, and how much is my employer paying in? And that could be your task for one month,” says Suter.

“The next task could be looking at: can I pay more in, or where is that money invested? Do I want to look at that, or do I have my login details so I can log into the account? I think if you break things down into more bite-sized chunks, it makes it a bit more manageable.

“I think it’s quite motivational, when you can tick something off your to-do list and you can think, great, I’ve made the first step into tackling that bigger problem. That can then spur you on to do more with it.”