Most of what goes wrong in private investing isn’t dramatic. It’s not a market crash, a fund collapse, or a once-in-a-generation event. It’s a handful of avoidable habits, repeated over decades, that quietly cost ordinary investors a substantial amount of money compared to what they could have had. The reassuring
If you’ve spent any time looking into FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), you’ll have come across a deceptively simple equation. Multiply your annual spending by 25, the formula says, and that’s the size of investment portfolio you need to retire. £30,000 a year of spending becomes a target of £750,000.
There’s a financial movement that began on the internet in the late 2000s, gathered serious momentum in the 2010s, and now has a sizeable UK following. It goes by the acronym FIRE: Financial Independence, Retire Early. The basic idea is that by saving and investing aggressively during your working years,
If you’ve decided you want to invest in line with your values, the next question is the one that most articles on ethical investing skip: where do you actually put the money? Ethical investing in a UK ISA is more practical than it was even five years ago, but the
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
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