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A millionaire British entrepreneur dying from terminal bone cancer with as little as two months to live has set up a charity for children bereaved by incurable disease.
Nick Hungerford, 43, who co-founded digital wealth management firm Nutmeg, is suffering severe pain from Ewing sarcoma with 30 tumours across his body.
The married father, who has a two-year-old daughter called Elizabeth, has endured frequent chemotherapy or radiotherapy which had extended his life by 18 months.
And Mr Hungerford, who is from the West Country but now lives in Washington DC, has now set up the charity Elizabeth’s Smile in her name to help bereaved children.
The businessman – whose company was sold to JP Morgan for nearly £700million in June 2021 – said he wanted the charity to provide resources for youngsters in the form of grief guides developed by experts, and provide a secure online community.
Nick Hungerford is married to Nancy and they have a two-year-old daughter called Elizabeth
Mr Hungerford lives with his family in Washington DC but he has as little as two months to live
Mr Hungerford is partnering in running the charity with his wife Nancy, a former news anchor, reporter and producer for CNBC International in Europe and Asia.
In a heartbreaking interview with the Daily Telegraph, he said: ‘It’s not the pain or fear of death that worries me most, it’s leaving my wife and my toddler daughter.
‘Elizabeth is just two and a half, and she will have to grow up without me. She is already a true Daddy’s girl – we share incredible hugs, she misses me when I’m at the hospital, and greets me with her toy stethoscope, saying how brave I am.
‘The thought of missing her first day of school, of not giving a speech at her wedding, buries me with emotion.’
Mr Hungerford added that Elizabeth is ‘too young to have active, internal memories of me’, but he has done everything possible ‘to show how much I love her’.
He has written letters and messages to be given to her in the future and even used an artificial intelligence website to video himself answering hundreds of personal questions, so she can ‘talk’ to him online in the future.
Mr Hungerford said his health battle began in December 2019 when he felt a pain in his right thigh – and, after some ‘nasty-looking gunk’ was removed from his leg, he was still in intense pain one month later.
Then, an X-ray showed a 5in (13cm) tumour in his femur. This was replaced with titanium, but by late 2021 the cancer had returned.
The University of Exeter graduate has received treatment at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in DC.
Mr Hungerford praised the work of the healthcare staff who have looked after him by posting a message of thanks on Facebook and giving them Elizabeth’s Smile-branded scrubs
Mr Hungerford, pictured at the Bloomberg Markets Most Influential Summit in London in 2016
He said the idea for the charity came in January 2022 when he and his wife were both offered alternative therapies of massage and acupuncture and family therapy to help them deal with their situation.
But he said ‘there was nothing available for children, despite research showing that children suffer terribly after losing a parent, and face many negative outcomes’.
Mr Hungerford added: ‘If I see a problem, I want to do something about it. Millions of children in the world are affected by parental death. I had to do something.’
In June 2021, Mr Hungerford’s firm Nutmeg was bought by JP Morgan in a move that saw the Wall Street bank wade into the UK savings market.
Nutmeg was only nine years old at the time, with Mr Hungerford and fellow tech entrepreneur William Todd earning several million pounds through the deal.
The firm, known as a ‘robo-adviser’, asks savers questions through its website or mobile phone app to judge their risk appetite. It then automatically invests their money into funds which track stock market indices like the FTSE 100.
Because it relies on technology, and ploughs savers’ money into ‘tracker’ funds, its fees are much lower than those charged by traditional wealth managers.
At the time of JP Morgan’s purchase, Nutmeg looked after more than £3.5billion of savers’ money, and had more than 140,000 customers.
Click here to find out more about Elizabeth’s Smile and donate if you wish
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