Best way to make my money work

smirker

Hello all thanks for your help in advance.
Any advice (funds,providers etc) would be greatly appreciated as I am a complete novice , I have tried to research myself but to be honest I am a bit overwhelmed by all the information and choice there is.
Im 61 years old retired /married no mortage in the happy position of having £480,000 (wife and myself) in savings from previous peps and isas recently boosted by inheritance and downsizing
I have a pension of £8000 pa , my wifes earns £14500 and will have small pension
We have ( currently) £30,000 worth of shares from sharesaves in a single company
£45,000 ns&i saving certs
£65,000 m&s bonds (which will mature this year)
£6,000 vls 80% with h&l
The rest is in various isa's and current accounts
I was going to use this years and next years isa allowance in another multi asset fund (dont know which one ) or put it in the existing vls 80% maybe with iweb before the price increase.
Is this a good strategy considering my age , my aim is to at least keep pace with inflation, I dont mind a slight risk with a small percentage .

Thanks.

Archi_Bald

The last thing you want to do is invest half a million because somebody on the internet told you what to invest in. You should be seeing an IFA and get proper professional advice.

MarkBargain

Charles Stanley Direct is a decent platform with low fees, so take a look at their website as you can browse funds and look at the details and performance of these.

I didn't want to fund any companies involved in human/animal rights abuses, arms, tobacco etc. so I went with a range of ethical funds covering UK and worldwide with fees all under 1% and put them in a Charles Stanley Direct ISA. I invested in the following, which have increased in value as below over the last five years:

CIS Sustainable Leaders C Trust Acc up just over 80%.
Jupiter Ecology I Fund Acc up around 46%.
Legal & General Ethical I Trust Acc up just over 80%.

smirker

Archi_Bald wrote: »

The last thing you want to do is invest half a million because somebody on the internet told you what to invest in. You should be seeing an IFA and get proper professional advice.

Thanks for your replies I am thinking of useing this and next years isa allowance on a multi asset fund not the whole lot.I have already been for advice from a buiding society advisor and will be going for advice from an ifa (have to pick one from unbiased) just getting as much info as i can.

jimjames

smirker wrote: »

Thanks for your replies I am thinking of useing this and next years isa allowance on a multi asset fund not the whole lot.I have already been for advice from a buiding society advisor and will be going for advice from an ifa (have to pick one from unbiased) just getting as much info as i can.

Remember a building society won't be able to give advice, what they call an advisor is just a salesperson for their own products which may or may not suit your requirements.

The best options really depend on the split you already have between the money so far which isn't very clear from the post as there seems to be hundreds of thousands missing from the amounts given in your post.

Is most of that difference already invested from PEPs or it is in cash savings?

masonic

smirker wrote: »

I was going to use this years and next years isa allowance in another multi asset fund (dont know which one ) or put it in the existing vls 80% maybe with iweb before the price increase.
Is this a good strategy considering my age , my aim is to at least keep pace with inflation, I dont mind a slight risk with a small percentage .

It would be more than a slight risk with a small percentage, but it is a small enough percentage that the overall effect on your accumulated wealth will be small. The single shareholding will tend to contribute greater risk.

Seems sensible to keep an open mind until you've engaged the IFA. It might be more valuable for you to ask some questions around the IFA proposal, rather than half-deciding on a plan here in advance. It is almost guaranteed the two won't be compatible.

smirker

jimjames wrote: »

Remember a building society won't be able to give advice, what they call an advisor is just a salesperson for their own products which may or may not suit your requirements.

The best options really depend on the split you already have between the money so far which isn't very clear from the post as there seems to be hundreds of thousands missing from the amounts given in your post.

Is most of that difference already invested from PEPs or it is in cash savings?

Except for £12,000 in premium bonds ,£22,000 in building society bond(4%) which matures next yr the rest is in cash isa's and current accounts.
Thanks

kidmugsy

smirker wrote: »

Im 61 years old retired /married no mortage in the happy position of having £480,000 (wife and myself) in savings from previous peps and isas recently boosted by inheritance and downsizing
I have a pension of £8000 pa , my wifes earns £14500 and will have small pension
We have ( currently) £30,000 worth of shares from sharesaves in a single company
£45,000 ns&i saving certs
£65,000 m&s bonds (which will mature this year)
£6,000 vls 80% with h&l
The rest is in various isa's and current accounts

As has already been said, see an IFA. But meantime my tuppenceworth is

(i) Retain the savings certificates if they are the index-linked variety. The new ones are nowhere near as good as the old, but they are still the only vehicle offering to beat RPI inflation tax-free at negligible risk, and you can't buy them any more, except by rolling over old ones. Heavens, you can even leave them to your widow.
(ii) Diversify those shares in a single company. If you still have ISA capacity for this tax year, act promptly.
(iii) Put your wife's earnings into a personal pension.
(iv) You have room to contribute too: get on with it, both of you, before the tax year expires.
(v) We are at a lousy period for investors. Most assets are pricey, some very pricey e.g. bonds, especially in the Eurozone, and shares, especially in the US. All you can realistically hope to do is (a) diversify, (b) keep fees and charges down (e.g. use "trackers" a lot), (c) avoid tax, and (d) not be in too much of a hurry to move from cash to financial assets i.e. you do need to diversify, but there's no need to rush.
(vi) For what it's worth I'd also consider buying some gold sovereigns if you have access to a safety deposit in which to store them. (Unfortunately all the banks near us have shut theirs.) I'd also store a few thousand pounds in cash in a good safe at home. I suggest these because I think the chances of another financial panic or crash in the next year or so is not negligible, and I can imagine that we could even get to the state of occasional empty ATMs for a while. If you think there's a chance of disruption of supply chains, be sure to stock some extra loo rolls, tinned food and so forth. Expenditure of a few hundred pounds on "stuff" is cheap insurance against needless discomfort. Just buy when you see Special Offers, two-for-the-price-of-one, and so forth.

Ryan_Futuristics

Well, I had some ISA allowance left over, and what I'm doing with it is filling it with (IFA's favourite) Standard Life Global Absolute Return ... Aka 'GARS' (one of the UK's largest managed funds)

The media's steered me away from these funds in the past, but I realise now they can provide very useful diversification benefits ... What they essentially do is run multiple investing strategies at once - mostly cautious and defensive, and spread across all sorts of asset classes - and simply aim to make consistent returns in all economic environments ... So while they lag pure shares funds over the short term, when you look over a longer horizon, when shares routinely tank, they often do rather well

They're basically a hedge against investing in conventional asset classes (which can all turn sour), but they're reliant on having a good investing process and minimising risk ... Other funds in this sector I'm buying are Newton Real Return (both of these two are very popular with IFAs) and a small amount in new one called Aviva Multi-strategy Targeted Return (managed by one of the founders of GARS)

I'm a bit of a contrarian - 2014, people were very negative on European shares, so that's what I was mainly buying ... This year (with more QE announced) everyone's very positive about shares, so I'm buying GARS-like Absolute Return funds

The other thing I think could be a great opportunity, in April, is the launch of Neil Woodford's Patient Capital investment trust ... A trust set up to provide long-term capital to innovative British businesses mostly in the healthcare and biotech sectors ... It's available to invest in now - a bit of an experiment; very good manager, but a new kind of fund for the team, and certainly one for a 5-10 year horizon ... It's also got a very innovative fee structure, which means it could be a very cheap fund to own if it fails to exceed quite ambitious performance figures of 10% annual returns

(These would be for ISA-level contributions - not the whole half million)

TheTracker

Ryan_Futuristics wrote: »

I'm a bit of a contrarian - 2014, people were very negative on European shares, so that's what I was mainly buying ... This year (with more QE announced) everyone's very positive about shares, so I'm buying GARS-like Absolute Return funds

Another month, another strategy.

Ryan_Futuristics

My strategy is to buy what's cheap, and hedge against losses in an environment of artificially inflated asset prices

Yours seems to involve shovelling money into Vanguard LifeStrategy whilst ignoring every analyst article on MorningStar?

We'll see how that works out for you