If you’ve ever tried to invest in line with your values, you’ll have noticed something frustrating. The financial industry uses about a dozen different labels for what looks, on the face of it, like the same thing. Ethical funds. ESG funds. SRI funds. Sustainable funds. Impact funds. Responsible investing. Green
If you’ve ever tried to work out how much money you need to retire, you’ve probably bumped into a strangely tidy number: 25 times your annual expenses. Save up that much, the argument goes, and you can spend roughly 4% of it each year for the rest of your life
There’s a strange psychological barrier between knowing your investment platform is too expensive and actually doing something about it. People will read article after article comparing fees, work out that they’re paying hundreds or thousands of pounds a year more than they need to, and then quietly do nothing about
There’s a financial decision that almost every UK employee has access to, that pays a guaranteed return measured in tens of percent, that’s protected from tax in both directions, and that takes about ten minutes to optimise. And yet most people, when asked about it, say something vague along the
The word diversification gets used in finance more often than it gets defined. People nod when they hear it, intuit that it’s something to do with not putting all your eggs in one basket, and move on. The actual mechanics of how diversification protects you, how much you need, and
There’s a kind of loss most savers never see, because it never appears on a bank statement. Your balance shows £10,000 today. Twelve months from now, it still shows £10,000. Nothing has gone missing. And yet, in any meaningful sense, you have less money than you did a year ago.
If you’ve come into a chunk of money and you’re trying to decide what to do with it, you’ve probably encountered two competing pieces of advice. The first is to invest the lot straight away, because time in the market beats timing the market. The second is to drip the
If you’ve started looking at where to put your first investment, you’ll have noticed that the same product appears to come in two slightly different forms. Sometimes it’s described as an index fund. Sometimes it’s an ETF. Sometimes the same global tracker is offered as both, with different ticker symbols
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
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
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
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
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