My investment performance in 2016

andrewm1981

Seeing as it's a new year, I thought I'd post a little update with where I am in 2017. Some people may be in a similar position to me, and I always like to see how others are doing!

Me: 35, married, no kids (yet!)

House: worth £370k in greater London. Mortgage of £220k. Paid off £12k this year, at 0.99%. No big repairs. Value increased by about £20k

Job: new job in civil service. Pays £30k, but 26% pension so a tidy £700 going in each month.

Investments:

£48k in s&s isa with HL. Gone up 4.8%. Not great. Worst investments were a couple of k into small mining companies, down 98%! Best was boohoo, up 390%.
£43k in fund&share account with HL. Put £5k into 8 different funds in September, nice 7% return in 4 months.
£9k in SIPP, all in vls100. Up 5%.

£40k in 6 different p2p platforms. No losses, and a strong 8% average return so I'm happy with those.

£75k in cash in a bank doing not a lot. Made about £1 probably.

So overall gain of about £42k, 75% of which was property.

And for 2017....

Waiting for the p2p isa, then putting another 15k in that. Not sure about the other £60k. Hang onto £20k, might wait for a slight dip in the market and invest in global tracker funds, or might invest in another 4 or 5 p2p platforms with a good secondary market so I can pull out easily if I want too.

Overall.... not massively happy with my investments, especially my shares. Wish I had just gone with trackers, as in the main my share punts have been bad. Only doing trackers going forward. P2p very happy with (nothing's gone wrong so far). Wish I'd invested the cash, but hindsights wonderful, eh?

economic

nice work. you look like you are in a healthy financial position and its good that you have invested.

my position is as follows (im 33, unmarried, no kids):

home worth £600k in highgate, mortgage £260k (i had released £50k equity on 2016)
S&S ISA worth £133k mainly index trackers which are up 20% or so.
Pension worth £85k
£80k in high interest accounts, P2P and NSI inflation linked certificates
£155k in cash doing nothing.

my plan for this year: buy more stocks on corrections and also high growth stocks. looking at investment property in london if prices start to fall (my parents will be gifting me some money).

AnotherJoe

Nice post thanks.
I've not tried p2p yet, of the platforms you are using which would you say is best for a beginner and ease of use?

cashbackproblems

For someone earning just 30k you are doing well!

My S+S is up about 20%, thanks mainly to Aberdeen Latin American fund, L+G USA tracker and AXA technology fund. half may portfolio are now trackers, unless i want country specific exposure e.g. Latin America/India/Middle east where i have bought active managed

Age 30: Job 55k (5% bonus), non contributory pension at 10%, currently worth about 20-30k.

S+S ISA with HL. At around 40k.
Old share account with X-O (no longer buy single stocks): Around 20k.

In the process of getting my own place (with 250k mortgage) so all the below will vanish but currently:

Cash ISA: 45k
Regular savers: 1k
Premium bonds: 2k

CC debt 2k.

economic

anyone have any smart ideas what to do with the £155k cash i have sitting in the bank doing nothing?

edinburgher

Just about to put our pensions up to 25%, good to see others with the same idea.

I think your 'not great' re. your S&S ISA is a serious understatement, I managed 19%+ with a boring as hell passive strategy. Perhaps time to revisit why you think that you can pick winners, but are relying on a passive approach for your SIPP?

andrewm1981

Economic: I've been so so tempted by property of many years, but I just feel like I've missed the boat, and the tax disincentives make it not viable. I hear lots of stories of people leaving the btl game, and I wonder why. But I still really want to do it!

AnotherJoe: I've been in ratesetter for about 3 years. Safe(ish)boring, low returns. The likes of ablrate, moneything, funding secure, savingstream plus a couple of others each have £5k of my money but I've only been with them 1 year. All fairly easy tbh. You can get really into it, and spend hours researching for each £50 you invest, but tbh I figure that enough other people have done that research already, and between them piled in 100k or so, so my £50 should be a reasonably wise investment. I never invest more than £100 in one individual company though, so I might be in 50-100 companies within each platform. I like ablrate and money thing and saving stream the most, although loans can be slow to come through. Take a punt with a couple of hundred and see how you get on. 13% is tempting!

Cash back problems: I worked in supermarket retail earning double what I do now, but frankly I hated the job, the hours were long and it wouldn't be conducive to a family life. I'd saved about £100k, and then received some inheritance allowing me to do what I've done-e.g. Halve my salary with a view to getting back to where I was salary wise in 5 years, but also have a far better work life balance, and a considerably better pension. Good luck with the house purchase! Best thing I ever did.

Edinburgher: I totally agree! TBH, I only had about £20k in there until mid august, then the other £20k went in, so only had half of in for 4 months!. Most of the first 20 was in shares, and about £4K in 8 mining company's, all of which tanked to about 90% down. I've left them there to remind me never to do that again. But I've learnt my lesson - only invest in boring trackers, they've all done far better than I could predict!

Andrew

Doshwaster

Funnily enough I've just spent the last couple of hours working out my annual state of affairs.

Age 44 and single (can't do much about that), salary £52k-ish depending on bonus.

House worth about £200,000 (if I redecorated and tidied up the garden) with £72,000 left on the mortgage.

Pension fund 1: £96,000 (really did well last year thanks to it being held 50% in a US tracker)
Pension fund 2: £6,000 (current employer crap 2% contribution from them and 5% from me)

S&S ISA: £26,000
Cash ISA: £8,000
Other shares & savings: £8,000

My car is 10 years old and is starting to fall apart so I will be dipping into the savings to replace it some time in the spring.

That gives me a total net worth of around £280,000 (up from £230k 12 months ago) which makes me feel fairly satisfied. The only worry is that my pension projections are still looking worrying low and that's with with a total fund size of over £100k. No early retirement in sight for me!

YellowStarling

Some impressive figures on this thread!

Would agree with the comments that the OP should think about the reward currently being offered on their more active investments. As they have already pointed out too, be good to reallocate some of the large cash holding they have with some activity in 2017.

Here're my two cents:

27, engaged but not married, no children, £51k salary, bought a house with my fiancee 18 months ago.

Pension of £14k, up 7% this year. I increased my overall contribution from 20% to 26% of gross income this year too.

Investments of £33k, up 16% this year - majority are passive trackers, but like another poster I do have some more active exposure to region and sector-specific, such as India, infrastructure, tech, etc. Also gambled against my vote on a Brexit result and made a little there with a bit of unusual (for me) active intervention.

P2P of £4k - up 8% (I also use Ratesetter mostly).

Property (1 live-in) - currently £290k, up 5% after fees.

£19k in instant access liquid (various current account savings, regular accounts and general cash emergency funds) - made 3%.

Debts: £9k student loan at 0.9% and £185k mortgage (fixed term ends in April so looking for an even lower fix) - have been overpaying on mortgage too.

Total: almost £351k, up 6.3% across the board, before debts.

Plans for this year include further S&S drip-investment, all accumulative. Will also continue to overpay mortgage. Spend on booking wedding will also reduce a hefty amount of the liquid holdings, so will look to replenish that too.

Hopefully another steady year! Happy New Year all

economic

economic wrote: »

nice work. you look like you are in a healthy financial position and its good that you have invested.

my position is as follows (im 33, unmarried, no kids):

home worth £600k in highgate, mortgage £260k (i had released £50k equity on 2016)
S&S ISA worth £133k mainly index trackers which are up 20% or so.
Pension worth £85k
£80k in high interest accounts, P2P and NSI inflation linked certificates
£155k in cash doing nothing.

my plan for this year: buy more stocks on corrections and also high growth stocks. looking at investment property in london if prices start to fall (my parents will be gifting me some money).

forgot to add my networth is around £788k. closing in on £800k fast! at age 33 living in london am i doing ok?

jimjames

economic wrote: »

anyone have any smart ideas what to do with the £155k cash i have sitting in the bank doing nothing?

Pension, investments? Do you already have S&S ISA?

andrewm1981 wrote: »

Investments:

£48k in s&s isa with HL. Gone up 4.8%. Not great. Worst investments were a couple of k into small mining companies, down 98%! Best was boohoo, up 390%.
£43k in fund&share account with HL. Put £5k into 8 different funds in September, nice 7% return in 4 months.

Not sure on the answer myself but is that the correct way round to have your investments? Wondering if the ISA wrapper might be better for the long term fund holdings rather than the trading shares? Looking at the returns the funds have done better so might make a bigger tax bill when you come to sell.