Investment & Investing

One of my favourite things to do is look through the prizes for the month after I've inevitably got nothing. Seeing someone win £1m after holding just £4,625 and a bond value of £125 for less than 18 months is,err, wild...

It’s the hope that kills you. Weirdly every time I’ve ever changed my address for my premium bonds (three times) I’ve got a prize (invariably £25) in the next couple of draws.

a £1 bond (of a total of £2 held) owned since the early 70s won £10,000 this month.
Hope they are checking their bonds.

Annoyingly there's no way online to say which bonds should be sold when you do cash some in, it automatically sells the oldest bonds first. You can nominate which bonds to sell if you do it by post, just not online.

I put my redundancy from previous job into PB and drew it down whilst I had some time off. This meant that the £5 of PB that had been bought for me when I was born got sold off first.

I could have saved it by filling in forms each time I wanted to sell but I just couldn't face that faff for ~6 months.

Of course, the maths says that it really doesn't matter.

Hello, total noob here who's been in a fairly bad way financially for a while. Getting on top of debt now and building up the rainday fund to the point I'd like to start siphoning off a small amount of the money I'm saving to invest. Currently using Plum, which is nice for helping me save. Path of least resistance seems to be to set up a "pocket" to invest with there, and let it do it's thing? Any strong recommendations for anything else (gold or similar?) or strong recommendations against using Plum? I keep half an eye on the thread but it goes over my head pretty quickly.
Liked the "time in market > timing the market" thing. Had a play with pocket money and btc trying to time things and holding would have done better.

my simple approach has been to put a regular amount in some sort of tracker fund in a S&S ISA and ignore it.

Sounds good. Seems easy to overcomplicate it.
Also just found a monthly saver account at the bank with like 5% interest for the year so should jump on that

strong recommendations against using Plum

The fees are higher than other platforms but not egregiously so (assuming I'm looking at the right company). The best you can get is about 0.15-0.25% depending on how adventurous you want to be (less for larger portfolios).

"Annual management fee is equal to 0.45% of the value of each of your ISA/GIA Platform Products." https://withplum.com/legal/fees_uk.html#GIA_ISA_Fees

I liked Plum for a bit, but eventually just moved to Vanguard since with Plum I was just paying into the same funds with an extra fee on top. The Plum fee sounds small at <0.5%, but when the annual growth is say 5-10%, that actually means you're losing as much as 1/10th of it. Obviously this compounds over years/decades.

But, having said that, it was quite nice that it did the saving for me and I didn't really have to budget or think about anything

Did you open the ISA account? You get fucked on tax if it's not in an ISA

Which isa?

I think Plum offered an S&S ISA along with a couple of other accounts. It doesn't matter too much to start with, you just don't want to end up with either the paperwork or cost of paying tax on it all

I see, thanks!

Yep okay looks like the £40 I've got in there now is in a funds isa of some sort

Getting on top of debt now

Well done for getting on top of it, not easy. Does that mean you have already paid it off, or have a plan to do so?

First rule of saving is do things in this order:

1. Pay off debt
   
2. Save
   
   

No point doing any of 2 before you have done all of 1 (mortgage and possibly student loans are the only exceptions) as it will be more expensive.

Don't know anything about Plum but somebody had to spend time and money to develop it, so they will want to earn a return on that investment, and there is only one place that return can come from...

Index tracker fund with eg Vanguard is the easy option that beats most others most of the time.

Hey, so yeah it's all sorted with payment plans and not costing me any interest so I'm feeling relatively in the clear there.
Going to take a look at vanguard for sure, thanks.

We were very fortunate and remortgaged last year at 1.6% for five years and having seen how easily the market can spook have decided to prioritise this debt. We can overpay by 10% per annum without penalty but it occurred to me with interest rates for savings accounts touching 3.5% that we'd be better off keeping the savings where they are for now.
Am I missing something obvious that will occur when we remortgage again and the rate will clearly be less favourable?

If you trust yourself not to touch the accruing pile of cash then you are better off not overpaying. That said, you need to figure out what your net-of-tax interest rate is - at 3.5% you are definitely better off in cash, but if rates come down 100 bps you might be better overpaying.

This book is good in terms of reinforcing how all the 'time in market' stuff is bang on.

If it's marginal, then personally I'd also consider the reduction of mental load of overpaying mortgage. If I was going to make <£1k over 5yrs I don't think I'd bother

You might look at it the other way and say that <£1k is a pretty low "option premium" for having readily available cash.

I did this for the last 13 years, or however long interest rates were low for. I had a tracker that was not much over base rate and just kept it at the same level.
Now that rates have gone up, I've used savings to pay it off.

Also need to consider the tax if you’re not keeping it in ISAs but not worth repaying if the rates stay high. Regular savers generally pay the highest interest or fixed rates are quite good at the moment if you shop around.

Thanks all, I’m going to crunch some numbers and return.

Thanks all, I’m going to crunch some numbers and return

CBA to actually post it, but this is perfectly golf club.

i saw oddbox was doing a seedr thing. i love oddbox so was tempted. next thing i know they’d raised 100%