£70k, WHAT DO YOU THINK ???

AlibeeAlibee

I will soon be in the position of having £70k sat in the bank.

My initial thoughts on where to put it are:

£15k my ISA allowance
£15k my husbands ISA allowance
£40k Premium Bonds

From my limited knowledge and trawling the www, my choices appear low risk.
What other options are there?
(Sensible answers only please, we dont want to 'blow the lot').

I eagerly await your replies.

Voyager2002

Are you likely to want/need to spend it in the next five years? If not, you ought to consider some kind of equity-based (stock market) investment, since the risk of losing the value of your money through inflation is greater than the risks arising from the stock market.

And do read what Martin has to say about ISAs: you will still need to decide what investments to hold within the ISA wrapper.

Ebe_Scrooge

They are indeed sensible options. Very low risk ( well, zero risk for all practical purposes ), but also quite low returns.

As ever with investments, you need to balance your risks against the returns. As a general rule of thumb, if you take higher risks then you get higher returns - but also the risk of high losses. If you're prepared to take a moderate risk, you could buy shares in some of the FTSE 100 companies. They should be "relatively" low risk, though by no means risk-free.

Or there are things like Zopa, where you lend money to others. I don't know what the returns are like, but from what I've read this is low - medium risk, as your money is spread out over a number of borrowers.

At the end of the day it's your call, how much risk are you willing to take, how much return are you realistically looking for ?

Voyager2002

Ebe_Scrooge wrote: »

They are indeed sensible options. Very low risk ( well, zero risk for all practical purposes ), but also quite low returns.

Except that they could use the ISA Allowance to buy shares in a high-risk company, which might or might not be a good idea (probably not). And the return on their investment in premium bonds is unlikely to be sufficient to make up for the way inflation erodes the value of their money. (Similar remarks apply to most cash ISA accounts, which pay interest rates so low that they seem like a sick joke.)

p00hsticks

AlibeeAlibee wrote: »

£15k my ISA allowance
£15k my husbands ISA allowance
£40k Premium Bonds

What sort of ISA's ? as Voyager202 says, these could be anything form a simple cash Isa (and probably paying next t nothing in interest) to a Stocks and Shares one containing some risky or not so risky equities.

If cash ISAs, you'll get a better rate from something like a Santander 123 current account ,even though you'll pay tax on the interest.

heytoki

have you considered Santander 123?
You can open two accounts (single and joint)

You would get £80 a month (£40 each acc) if you put 20k each.

Archi_Bald

Actually, between 2 people you can have 3 123 accounts - one sole each, and one joint. That takes care of £60K.

You can also have a total of 6 TSB Plus accounts, two sole each, and two joint each, taking a total of £12,000.