isa's bonds advice 30 September 2007 at 8:45PM in Savings & investments 3 replies 588 views

fizzysweets

hi just after some advice on what to do with £3000 savings and a monthly amount of £100. I like the idea of an isa but which one mini cash, maxi ect and i have also seen the egg guarenteed bond which they have on their website would it be worth putting the £3000 in there and the £100 a month into an isa or put it all together could be really greatful o some advice as really no idea. thank in advance

dunstonh

egg guarenteed bond

Rubbish product. Search this forum for guaranteed equity bonds. You wont hear a good word said about them.

Basically, they are cash cows for providers. They have a few soundbites that sound good (such as "guaranteed") but when you analyse them and look at the implicit costs (hidden costs) you realise that they are completely awful.

munk

Stay well clear of the Egg bond, license to print money for Egg

Personally I would pick a couple of decent performing cautious managed funds and run with them for a while at £50 each per month. Cautious managed funds are funds that have a good diversity of asset allocation suitable for cautious investors who don't want to dump all their money in one single asset type and then see it drop in value when that asset class starts to perform badly.

Actually - if you have £3000 to start with, you could start out with a nice portfolio of say 6 or more different funds, invest £50 in each per month (£300/month total) for 10 months (total of £3000) and then adjust your monthly payments back down to just £100 between two funds. That way you'd have a nicely diversified portfolio to start off with and you can think about rebalancing it once a year (ie switching some of the excess in the 2 extra monthly funds over to the other 4 funds to balance things out).

Some examples of decent performing cautious managed funds are Midas balanced growth and the Jupiter merlin range, though there are stacks out there to choose from. Maybe look at the citywire ranking site to see which have performed well, make sure to check out the fund manager's performances as well though, much more important than just the fund's past performance alone.

I would recommend Hargreaves Lansdown for monthly investing in ISA funds.

cheerfulcat

Investment trusts might be worth a look. A good generalist global fund is like a complete portfolio in one share, with low costs and a decent spread of investments across all asset classes. Many of them also offer an ISA wrapper.