Old share account advice?

boomish

I bought a bunch of shares in Future Publishing (when I worked for them) way back and have had them stored in a site called Moneyextra.com, I hung on too long and they lost 80% of the value as publishing nose dived.

Now the site is closing and want to move to a site called The Share centre, these guy s will charge me a monthly fee and inactivity charge, I don't trade etc I just hoped to hang on to them in case they went backup a bit. Do I just cut my losses and sell the lot?

I'm totally inexperienced and rubbish with saving am gutted we lost so much money, but it was years ago so have to accept it's gone and move on I suppose.

I'd really appreciate any advice..

Linton

Investing in a single share is highly risky as you have found out. Unless you have the money to buy a reasonable value in say 15 different shares then you would be better advised to invest in funds where the risk is spread over possibly hundreds of shares. Even if you do have the money then funds would normally be better.

From your stated inexperience I assume you have no, or minimal, other investments. So were I in your position I would sell up now and avoid any further hassle. If the total amount you get even after the drop in value is significant you could consider starting to invest in funds not individual shares.

Buying a serious amount in your employer's shares is particularly risky as if your employer fails you lose both your job and possibly a large % of your savings.

boomish

Thanks Linton, I'm not too bad I've got 3 pensions, (not that they are worth much) I've paid into since I was 17, ISA's for my wife & I & two property's with a crazy low mortgage.
I'm rubbish at the constant renewing of saving accounts for the best rates, not upping my pensions and renewing ISA's etc, now we can't afford to save anything so trying to hold on to everything we have.not sure what to do with pensions not earning anything etc etc

The shares was when I was a freelancer, I bought at the totally wrong time, I did understand the risk but the publisher had just gone through a huge boom and many employees made a lot of money! I got some shares after a roll of big job,s following some bad advice from a friend, when the shares dipped very low, everyone expected them to bounce back but they didn't.
Unfortunately the big mistake was rather than cut my losses I hung in there, publishing in the stock market has declined every since, I just kept thinking well there is little point selling, I have earn't some dividends so not all a loss but even so it's still a about 4.5k loss
Spoke to a customer service woman at The Share centre, they will charge 15 to sell now and 1% or 7.50 min when it turns into an account under The Share Centre.
She didn't sound interested in helping me at all..Strange but I value customer service so much now.