Owning your own home

A digital clock, 24hr format?

Thanks all. Offer been refused, but they are only asking for a bit more . Going to hang out in Penge/ Anerley tonight and decide if we really want it :)

Port Meadow?

maxed out your pension allowance (somewhat age depending)
maxed out your S&S ISA allowance
paid off any expensive debt

What I want is a little calculator or something that an idiot (or worse, me) could understand that tells me when I should be paying extra into pension or ISA vs. when I should be overpaying my mortgage...

You mean a crystal ball that will tell you what returns you'll get on various investments?

So the calculator just needs to know future interest rate movements, your risk appetite, and what cashflow & liquidity requirements you're going to have in the future 😅

You could probably build something that would show all those things plus tax paid, for different splits and interest rate curves, but I feel like the amount of data you'd have to type in first would discourage most users.

Fair point, but if the original statement is true it must have a basis in relatively fixed numbers? I guess if we're talking S&S it could use average performance over time or something but I was thinking more about the pension or cash ISA where the returns are more likely to be fixed. What would be neat is plugging in some values, aiming it at a particular bank or product and have it grab the current rates to compare.

Or yeah, where can I get a crystal ball.

No it doesn't need to be that complicated.

Say I have £500 per month "spare" and the mortgage rate is x and the ISA rate is y. Which one? That kind of thing. Obvs you need to just stick in an estimate if you're talking about more fluctuating stuff but I couldn't tell you how much my pension varied by each month anyway, so let's assume we have a rough % idea.

I think the risk (which might be why it's not a more commonly offered thing) is that the same factors which impact returns on one thing also impact the others, e.g. low interest rates make mortgage cheap (low savings from overpay) but push up asset prices (might be good for stocks).

You can chuck some fixed numbers in but there's a big risk it would be misleading if you use e.g. s&p averages over a long ish period.

I'd be surprised if your pension gives fixed return unless it's fixed the return at a number which is pretty low!

It's just employer contribs. I've no idea what it returns. Never really looked at it.

I've been less concerned with pensions and more into paying off my mortgage. Investments are too fickle and I'm really not interested so I prefer to just pay off debt then build cash and then do stuff with cash. But if there was something that could go "now is probably a good time to overpay" or "now, rather than overpay, why don't you stick some coin into your pension"

I guess it's pretty simple for me really: high interest rates it's probably better to reduce mortgage debt because I'm not the kind of person that can make good investment choices (I just don't care).
If the interest rates are low, then maybe I could chuck more into ISA or pension.

It's the question about what is high and low that I'm less sure about.

Big factor is how much you earn - as you get tax relief on pension contributions, so £1 in doesn't cost you £1 or foregone spending cash, whereas you don't have that benefit from mortgage.

But the quicker I pay off mortgage, the more money I have for beer whereas I'll be dead before I can even get to my pension.

Fair point though. I have some other salary sacrifice saving things running. What I might do is when they expire/mature I'll stick that into pension instead. Then, I won't notice any difference to my spending money and can overpay randomly if I feel flush

Spend enough on beer and you reduce the odds of surviving even further...

All this stuff is weird though - what feels right probably isn't always technically the best answer - I overpay on mortgage too even though it's not as tax efficient (gives more flexibility against property price crash etc, though)

I don't like dealing with money, so I definitely err towards smashing the mortgage because the quicker I can pay that off the less money those arseholes at the bank get and I don't feel I've a thing hanging over me vs. having to think about where to invest or how much to contribute to the pension etc.

Humans are risk averse generally and I'm probably more risk averse in this regard.

Yep - beautiful start to the commute, but my smugness didn't last long because the return train journey has been a bit of a mess.

I'm not the kind of person that can make good investment choices (I just don't care).

Global tracker. It matches the mean performance of every publicly traded company on Earth (by size). It's simultaneously the most low-effort and (one of the) most effective way to invest for most people. You don't need to look at it or change it every year or whatever.

The default pension funds are usually megashit, just like your bank's basic savings account is megashit. You wouldn't stick £100k in an account that earns 0.1% interest for 30 years when there are others that earn 3.8%. Not looking at your pension and leaving it in shitty investments is basically the same thing

Lush! I've got a mate who lives in Wolvercote, works in Oxford. Has walked, run, cycled, canoed and swum his commute in the few years he's lived there...

I have a SIPP that I have control over that is mostly tracker funds and since I went permie I have a company pension (actually two of them) that are managed by some pack of souless demons in The City, I presume.

I tried logging in to it today to see where the money is invested and of course their site crashed.

EDIT: After confirming I'm not a USA person I'm in.

Wow, there's fuck all in this pension.

Looks like they have an ISA option. I don't have an ISA. I guess maybe I should do that shit. Or, maybe just add some personal contributions to this pension fund on top of the employer ones.

Is your SIPP maxed out? Wouldn't it be better to put more money into it since you get the
income tax on top vs ISA which is post tax?

The employer SIPP thing would be bare minimum employer contributions and nothing from me. My own SIPP thing is static - I don't add anything to it now.

Ah, I knew I'd asked about this before. This is what my employer SIPP thing offers:
https://www.lfgss.com/comments/16964504/

I don't know why it's called a SIPP - it's not really managed by me. It's a fund managed by the company my employer use.

At least you aren't on that awful Oxford tube coach thing I used to see from Liverpool Street. Always used to feel sorry for the poor bastards who had to use it.

That's where we've moved to!

I passed a few swimmers on my way in this morning.

As soon as we went to the river on Sunday, I thought...

I don't know why it's called a SIPP - it's not really managed by me. It's a fund managed by the company my employer use

In principle you can usually choose between a few funds, but unless you actually want to manage it yourself, the default is usually some "lifestyle" fund that starts drawing down from equities to fixed income to cash as you get closer to your target retirement date.

I've generally stuck with those default funds because:

1. The website and the information available are often both appalling (so it's hard to figure out whether the alternatives would actually be better)
   
2. I can't be arsed, and it seems pretty unlikely I'm going to come up with a better scheme than the default unless I give up the day job and do it full time
   
   

I might change my mind about #2 if there's another massive recession just as mine start drawing down, but then again I might be too busy scavenging in bins to worry about it.

Check the fees.

A global (or similar, non-specific) tracker, invested by you in a sipp, could cost below 0.1% per year.

Funds managed for your soulless corp pension could be 3% - 5% and higher per year.

Which would make any investment decision all but moot.