Investment & Investing

We have opened a Halifax regular saver for our little one, pays 6% Apr, with maximum £100 a month...

As featured here http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/child-savings-tax-free

What if you don't like them? Some kids turn out bad. Keep it in your name in case you have an evil one. Kids don't appreciate stuff they're guaranteed to be given for free either. In fact, just spend the £100 on yourself at least you know you won't waste it on a rusty VW Beetle like I did with the £1000 my granddad gave me when I turned 18.

What would you do £5000?

Pay off an extra chunck of the mortgage.
Over time that would be your best return.

p.s - The Nutmeg online investment platform is working out quite nice for me.
Kick backs for referals so holla at me if you fancy giving it a try.

I've got no mortgage. What about starting to dabble in stocks and shares?

I refer you to my previous post.
S&S ISA through Nutmeg then.

Can you give me some more details? and then youll get your kickback!

You can create an account and play with the interface, building a couple of investment scenarios and looking to possible returns etc, without putting any money in.

The interface is dead clear.
The web chat and phone support is really good - actual human talking plain english.
The only negative I would raise is that their investment cycle is weekly, so depending on when you put you cash in you could be waiting 10days to see it appear in your fund.

PM me your name and email address and I'll send you an invite.

Is there an easy investing platform like nutmeg (which i currently use) which has an ethical/green investing option?

There are funds out there that do ethical/green, look for Socially Responsible Investments (SRI).

The problem with the sector is that that there is limited consensus on what is / is not a an ethical/green investment and the view of the investment manager may not match with your perception of what is green/ethical. One example of this is the church of England investing in Wonga

To be rather cynical, you are going to be paying higher fees (because its active management) and the investment manager is going to be as focussed on the SRI components of the mandate as on generating returns. This increases the risk of under performance... Whether that is an acceptable risk to take is entire up to you.

If theoretically we sell up and move out of London, would it be better to spend all the dosh on a massive house or get something more modest and invest the rest? Mortgage would probably be wiped out, either way.

My current preferred plan is a fleet of slightly used supercars.

My current preferred plan is a fleet of slightly used supercars.

Over the last 5 years cars have been a better investment than anything else that is tangible.

This might mean you've missed the boat, but I still think there are some that look too cheap. 996 911, F360, most late 90s stuff.

They have to be garaged/not driven though, right?

Nah. Just don't do loads of miles and service them according to schedule. General rule is keep the useage as it's been used, so if it's done 1,000 miles a year on average stick to that average.

Anybody got any thoughts on the stock market? I am thinking of moving my cash isa into shares isa and currently looking at barclays and Berkeley group (bkg) both taken a substantial hit since Brexit but appear to be solid companies.
My cash isa rates are awful if I move it, it's not much better. So may be more risk required. Hoping to get on the housing ladder before I go grey and bald.

Buy gold.

Think the gold ship has sailed, hasn't it? Price spiked straight after Brexit when everyone wanted a 'safe' investment.

Anyone know anything much about green/eco/sustainable investment? At some point, if we're not all to die fiery deaths, those markets must surely explode, right?

Check out the book 'Smarter Investing' by Tim Hale. Helped me get to grips with what I should be doing to not be an idiot with my S&S and it's helped me get a very satisfactory ROI so far.

how would you feel about losing 50% of you money - not saying it will happen but its a risk if you put all of your money in 2 individual stocks.

If you are looking at the stock market 4 thoughts
1: decide on your asset allocation model - you can find these for free by going onto the website of IFAs and playing with their models - broadly tell them how risk tolerant you are and they will suggest a portfolio. Do it on a couple of different websites to get an idea
2: the only thing you can control are the ongoing costs of your investments, which negatively impact your overal return. For small investors - say less than GBP 10,000 - I cannot see the reason for having actively managed investments.
3: Understand pound cost averaging and how it works for you.
4: You cannot time the market - if you could you would already be in front of a blomberg terminal, trading.

One of my favourite resources for this kind of discussion is http://thereformedbroker.com/

How much money have you got (you don't have to answer this) and what do you want to do with it? If you want to buy a house in the next couple of years, rather than leaving it in there long-term, you might do better with current accounts.

For example I have a setup thus:

1. Each payday I put a grand into a Nationwide account (Flexsomething) that gets 5% interest on 2,500
   
2. The next day I take the grand out and put it into a Santander 1-2-3 account, which gets 3% interest on a maximum of 20,000. This is also my current account.
   
3. Then I take the grand out and split it:
   
4. 200 into my partner's Help to Buy ISA (which gets 2% plus a 25% bonus when buying your first home), you can only pay in 200 a month
   
5. 500 into another Nationwide account (Flexicurity?) that gets 5%, but you can only pay in 500 a month.
   
6. 300 into a shared account of the above (my partner has the same setup and contributes into this account). This account gets cashback on the first 100's worth of contactless payments, so we do our food shopping from this account.
   
   

Leftovers and interest currently goes into my old Natwest account which gets 1%, so I need to find something better.

So we get 3% on most of our savings and 5% on a few grand more.

Of course fidbod actually seems to know his shit... you would be better off listening to him for anything longer-term than a couple of years. But the method I use gets reasonable returns immediately and you can take your money out at any time, so if you want to buy a house imminently it might be a better option.

The first question we need to answer is how long are you investing for? If you're thinking of buying a house within the next 5 years, then investing in the stock market is probably not a sensible move. Fundamentally, the benefits of investing in it are long term, i.e. greater than ten years, rather than short term.

What about a house-sized chunk of money, for 6 months to a year?