how to invest wisely?

need_advice_6

Please help me – I really don’t wont to do the wrong thing!

I am about to sell my house (privately) for 200K The purchasers (friends of ours) are then going to rent it back to me at a cheap rate for up to 1 year (afterwhich the rent will go up). I will be paying off my mortgage (about 45K) and we hope to move in the near future as soon as we can find a suitable property.

- We have worked out that the monthly interest will almost cover the rent and as we wont be having to pay a mortage, by the time we have met the balance of the rent we should be about £250 per month better off.

I am also receiving an inheritance in the next few weeks of about 150K and in addition have had a previous inheritance of around 60K

My question is where is the best place to put the money so that I can have easy access for when we do find a property (we also need easy access so that we can pay the monthly rent).

The move to our next house will probably use all of our savings, so I think we will be unable to tie up the money in long term bonds. We already have ISA’s and accounts with ICICI and INGDirect.

If possible we would like to remain mortgage free – but only if that is the best option for us.

I dont want to sound as if we have loads of money - my up bringing was such that every penny counts and the inheritances are from my parents / granparents. So I really do value the meaning of money and certainly dont want to do the wrong thing with it.

Many thanks from "need advice"

dunstonh

Basically, unless you are high risk in nature, you dont want to be investing the money. The timescales are not long enough to look to invest. So, you need to be sticking to deposit accounts. For information on what are good savings accounts, then just look at a number of recent questions that ask the same thing.

Snow_Dog

With those kind of sums of money it would be nice to think you could bargain with a bank/building soc. manager to get some good deals, however those times have gone.

I was looking into safe investments for approx 150-200K a little while ago and the effort required in terms of setting up drip feed accounts (regular savers) and so on to scrape the extra interest was amazing.

Even accounts like the regular savers that give good headline rates up to 10% have so many catches (such as maintaining a crummy current account with balance) that you end up making an extra 1% on maybe £3K. A whole extra £30 over a year.

Still if you have the time and money there its what you have to do to maximise your returns. Good luck, I found the easiest way was to set up an excel spreadsheet, then its just a case of moving the figures round to get maximum return.