Somewhere along the way, investing got a reputation it doesn’t deserve. Bring it up at a dinner party and watch people’s eyes glaze over. There’s a general assumption that it involves red braces, six screens of flashing numbers, and a working knowledge of derivatives markets. It doesn’t. For almost everyone reading this, it involves none of those things, and anyone telling you otherwise is either selling you something or showing off.
Here’s the truth, without the usual sales patter. Investing well is mostly boring. It’s supposed to be boring. If your investments are exciting, something has probably gone wrong.
That’s the whole premise behind Simple Investing. A plain-English explanation of the thing itself, aimed at people who have money sitting around doing nothing much and would quite like it to do something.
The industry likes making this sound harder than it is
Financial services has spent decades dressing itself up as more complicated than it needs to be, and the reasons are not exactly mysterious. Complexity is profitable. If investing sounds difficult, you’re more likely to pay someone else to do it for you. Or, more commonly, you do nothing at all, and your money sits in an account earning next to nothing while inflation quietly eats away at it. Doing nothing feels like the safe option. It isn’t. It’s just a risk wearing a disguise.
The actual mechanics, once you strip away the jargon, are about as complicated as setting up a standing order. You won’t need a maths degree. You won’t need to know what a collateralised debt obligation is. If you ever do need to know that, someone has already made a catastrophic mistake somewhere in the global financial system, and it’s no longer your problem.
Who this is for
This is written for people who’ve looked at investing before, felt the particular fog that descends when someone starts talking about “asset allocation,” and quietly closed the tab. People with some money set aside, a vague sense they should be doing something with it, and zero interest in becoming the sort of person who has opinions about interest rate policy at parties.
It’s also written specifically for people in the UK, which matters more than you might think. A huge amount of investing advice online is American, built around American accounts, American tax rules, and a retirement system that looks nothing like ours once you get past the surface. ISAs work differently. UK pension timing works differently. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.
What makes it different
Most investing content sits at one of two extremes. Either it’s so vague it’s useless, along the lines of “just start early,” which is the financial equivalent of “just be happy.” Or it’s so drenched in technical detail that reading it feels like assembling flat-pack furniture with instructions translated badly from Swedish.
Simple Investing sits in the middle on purpose. Detailed enough to actually follow. Simple enough to actually finish. There’s no pretending you need thousands of pounds before you’re allowed to start, and no unnecessary detours into topics that only matter to hedge fund managers and people who enjoy spreadsheets a bit too much.
Where to actually begin
Simple Investing for Absolute Beginners covers the fundamentals. What investing genuinely is, how ISAs work, why saving and investing aren’t the same thing whatever you’ve been told, and how to get going without needing a small fortune first.
For anyone eyeing up early retirement, Simple Investing Guide to FIRE goes further, with a properly UK-focused look at the FIRE movement, including the bit almost everyone skips over: how the UK State Pension changes the sums considerably. You very likely need less than the internet’s favourite “25 times your spending” rule suggests, once you factor in a pension arriving to help you out later.
Both books are written the way this article is written. Directly, plainly, and without assuming you already speak the language. You don’t need to. You just need to start.
Simple Investing is a series of plain-English UK investing guides by Stuart Welch. Browse the books or follow along on Instagram @simpleinvesting.book and @simpleinvesting.fire for regular tips.