How much should I leave in my ISA?

atush

gadgetmind wrote: »

Fine, but you'll have to accept that rather than your money being able to grow and/or generate income, it will instead struggle to maintain its buying power.

So Very very true.

OP, you haven't mentioned your pension situation, what is it?

NH2004

Some good points made.


But in my present situation as a new house owner with a young family I prefer to keep my cash more readily available and less at risk.
I agree I could make more money, but I'm not looking to get rich, just have peace of mind.


My pension situation is good. I'm fortunate enough to have close over 20 years in a final salary pension, along with about 10 years of AVCs.

hornmeister

If you want to keep it fairly liquid and secure, I'd open as many of these 3% current accounts you can; I believe as a couple you can have 2 or 3 Santander ones. Throw in another couple of banks and that's 3% gross. Depending on your tax status that's better than 1.6% in an ISA and instantly available also.

But really you should considder a small dabble in a S&S ISA. Even fairly Safe tracker funds will give you a better %.

gadgetmind

NH2004 wrote: »

But in my present situation as a new house owner with a young family I prefer to keep my cash more readily available and less at risk.

Given your pension situation, and amount of cash remaining, that makes sense. I just wanted to be sure you were ignoring equities for good reasons rather than bad ones!

BarrBru

NH2004 wrote: »

Got badly burned years ago when investing in stocks and shares. So prefer to keep my money at hand in safe, if albeit "potentially" less profitable options.

Well that's awful but without knowing your circumstance, small investors often get it wrong because they whack all their money in to the market when it's at its peak and take it out when it goes down.

The stock market in the long run only goes one way - UP!!!

.....but, not in a straight line. It zig-zag.

Look, I'm stealing this from someone else on here but Scottish Investment Trust has a 29 year record of increasing its dividend every single year. When averaged out it is by 7% per years, every year compounded.

City of London has a 44 year record of increasing its dividend every year.

There are many more but I won't go on and on.

I don't want to come across as at all condescending because you had a really bad but very real experience which is heartbreaking but I just think you could do a lot better if you were better advised.