Sustainable investing has become one of the most discussed and least understood ideas in personal finance over the past decade. I’ve seen it evolve and change throughout the latter years of my time in the industry. The terminology shifts every few years. The marketing has run ahead of the substance.
The short answer to “when can I retire” depends on three numbers: how much you have, how much you need to live on each year, and when your other income sources arrive. I get asked this a lot. It is not a question of age. It is a question of
For more than a decade, the standard piece of UK retirement tax advice ran along the same lines. Spend your ISA first. Leave your pension alone. The pension passes outside your estate for inheritance tax, so on death an unused pot could go to your children or grandchildren without the
There is a small inconvenience in personal finance that almost no one talks about honestly. The thing that makes the biggest difference to whether you end up with money, more than your salary, more than your fund choice, more than your tax wrapper, is something you cannot buy, cannot accelerate,
The rise of what became known as Ethical Investing was a real feature of the latter years of my career. In the early years folk weren’t sure how important it was going to be, nor was there any early governance on what Ethical Investing actually comprised. What make one product
Of all the FIRE variants, the one most likely to actually work for ordinary UK earners is also the least talked about. Full FIRE (saving aggressively until you can stop working entirely) requires very high savings rates that most people genuinely can’t sustain over a decade or more. The maths
When someone is considering ethical investing for the first time, the question they ask first (or worry about silently) is almost always the same: do ethical funds underperform? It’s a fair question, and one the ethical investing industry has historically been bad at answering directly. The marketing tends toward “you
There’s an investing concept that gets discussed often but explained badly. The financial industry treats it as a sophisticated technique requiring careful judgment and ideally professional help. The honest truth is that rebalancing your portfolio is one of the simpler maintenance jobs in long-term investing, and most ordinary investors either
If you’ve been investing for a while and you’ve started bumping up against the limits of your annual ISA allowance, the question of where to put the next pound of investment money becomes genuinely interesting. The default UK answer is the Stocks and Shares ISA, with its tax-free growth and
If you’re earning enough to pay higher-rate or additional-rate tax in the UK, the rules around pension contributions get more interesting and more rewarding than they are for basic-rate taxpayers. The tax relief is generous, the allowances are substantial, and used properly the system is one of the best deals
Most of what goes wrong in private investing isn’t dramatic. It’s not a market crash, a fund collapse, or a once-in-a-generation event. It’s a handful of avoidable habits, repeated over decades, that quietly cost ordinary investors a substantial amount of money compared to what they could have had. The reassuring
If you’ve spent any time looking into FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), you’ll have come across a deceptively simple equation. Multiply your annual spending by 25, the formula says, and that’s the size of investment portfolio you need to retire. £30,000 a year of spending becomes a target of £750,000.
Free chapter
Sign up and get the first chapter of Simple Investing for Absolute Beginners — free. No
spam, no sales pressure. Just a chapter of the book.
