Advice for investment newbie?

jacquelinestar

Hi there,

I’m an investment newbie and, after a fair amount of research into P2P platforms last year, I decided Saving Stream seemed like a safe enough bet given how high the returns are. However, since then I’ve been warned that sites like SS have cropped over the years and gone under because of their high risk portfolio. I’m not well versed enough when I read the SS FAQs to see what the specific risks of SS might be, so I wondered if any of you had advice on where I should be putting my money?

My situation: I have about £9k to play with – and that’s my life savings, for a house deposit, so I don’t want to lose it! On the other hand, I’d love to be able to buy somewhere soon and I live in London so perhaps my desperation is causing me to act irrationally!

-£2k I have in a 5% interest bank account (that’s the limit I can put in there)
- I’m just about to put £1k into a 4% help-to-buy ISA which gives me a 25% return on closing the account on the £200 max a month I’ll be allowed to deposit over the next few years
- I have a couple of other highish interest savings accounts where I put in about £400 a month
- The remaining 6k I have in SS – and I’m loving the fact I’ve made £50 in a month and a half (took a while for me to get the loans)

Is this too risky a spread, and if so, is it worth me maybe keeping a couple of thousand in SS anyway because it’s so high return?

What would be your recommendations for other platforms? Zopa, Ratesetter don’t seem that great really in terms of risk / return ratio… and I’m guessing my amount is too small to think seriously about stocks etc. (I saw an investment platform which looked quite good though, any experience with that?) Most ISAs are useless unless they’re a Help to Buy (I’m wondering whether I can open a couple if they’re in different tax years).

Thanks all and sorry for such a newbie question, but I’d really appreciate your collective experience!

Many thanks,
Jacqueline