If you’ve spent any time looking into UK savings, you’ve probably encountered the word ISA more times than you can count, often used as if everyone already knows what it means. The reality is that there are four different types of ISA in the UK, each designed for a different purpose, and most people don’t…
The honest summary of risk and reward in investing is shorter than most articles on the topic. Investments that have historically produced higher returns have also produced bigger ups and downs along the way. Investments that don’t move around much don’t make you much money. That trade-off is the whole game, and almost every investing…
Go to any UK investment platform and you’ll be offered two broad types of fund. Active funds, where a manager picks investments with the aim of beating the market. And passive funds — usually called trackers or index funds — which simply mirror an index and don’t try to beat anything. The active fund will…
Working through the Lifetime ISA pros and cons is an unusual exercise, because the same product manages to be both the most generous and the most punitive ISA the UK government offers — at the same time. It hands you a 25% top-up on everything you contribute. That’s free money on a scale unmatched by…
If you’ve spent any time reading about investing — even a few articles — you’ll have noticed something odd. Whether the source is a Nobel-winning economist, a personal finance blogger, the Money pages of a broadsheet, or your slightly evangelical friend who’s read one Tim Hale book, they all eventually recommend the same thing: an…
If you’ve been investing for a while, there’s a question that probably crosses your mind every few months: am I doing this right? Sometimes the question is prompted by a market wobble, sometimes by a colleague’s confident-sounding stock tip, sometimes by a financial podcast you didn’t mean to start listening to. Whatever the trigger, the…
Fees are the most boring part of investing. They’re also the only part you can control with absolute certainty. You can’t control whether the FTSE All-Share goes up or down. You can’t control inflation, interest rates, or what an American president decides to post on a Tuesday morning. But you can control, exactly, what your…
Most people who haven’t started investing assume they need a lot of money. A few thousand pounds, at least. Maybe ten. Some round number that signals “now I’m a proper grown-up with proper savings, and I can do the proper grown-up thing.” That belief keeps people out of the market for years. Sometimes decades. It’s…
Once you’ve accepted that you should be investing, the next question is usually: where? The two obvious answers in the UK are a Stocks and Shares ISA and a SIPP (Self-Invested Personal Pension). Both are tax wrappers. Both let you hold the same kinds of investments. Both reward people who keep adding money for decades….
Category: The Long Game · Reading time: 9 minutes · By Stuart Welch At some point — possibly soon, possibly not for years, but certainly at some point — you will open your investment account and find it is worth less than you put in. The number will be red. There may be a minus sign. Here we talk…
